You're 100% correct that it's not the absolute quickest or easiest method for implementing what would be deemed a quick change. It is, however, a great way to reduce risk. It's my personal opinion that something even as simple as an UPDATE statement comes at a great cost on your production environment. It should be tested all the way up the chain of environments, backups should be issued on your database, etc, etc. It's really not easy unless you're whole-heartedly okay with the potential ramifications of "cowboy coding" so to speak. I myself have been bitten by performing live query UPDATEs/DELETEs very early on in my career, and API first development is designed to protect people like myself from bad things happening.