Database abstraction and SQL optimization in Drupal

I was reading through Oracle's project to integrate with Drupal and planning to attend the Enterprise session and the Performance and Scalability event.

The points raised by the Oracle white paper boil down to: 'Platform-neutral' SQL is not a good idea for application development.

"The approach of using platform-neutral SQL is well-intentioned but painfully impractical for complex software. The experience in this project backs up this claim."

This attitude mirrors our internal developers' primary criticism of Drupal: It will never perform ideally while the database abstraction layer is in place, because we can't leverage the full power of the database platform.

Is the Drupal project willing to consider abandoning database abstraction and settling on a single database -- or, more accurately, a single optimized SQL syntax -- requirement? What are the pros and cons of such a decision? How would that decision ultimately get made?

I know this topic is high on my organization's radar and am wondering if others agree.