It's not hesitance to learn something new. People avoid SQL for a variety of fairly rational reasons. For me, the biggest one is that most general-purpose programming languages encourage you to solve large problems by splitting them up into manageable chunks. SQL, on the other hand, encourages you to lump different problems together (for performance reasons).

It also has remarkably poor tools for code reuse and abstraction. Have you ever worked with SPs that dynamically generate SQL code? I see it daily. Not only that, it's code written by professional database administrators.