2. The number of 'sysop's is rapidly rising, and the chances of

somebody accidentally (or maliciously) performing a slow, complex query that tied up the database for a long time would increase.

It's pretty hard to do that with a SELECT, and it's only temporary. I think it's handly for sysops to be able to find things out like how many users use a certain skin, how many page titles contain a certain word, etc., without having to provide special pages for every possible query.