JSTL goods and bads

Although JSTL (JavaServer Pages Standard Tag Library) already exists for a while, only a few days ago I gave it some attention. It's a nice set of tag libraries, specially those for manipulating variables, strings and internationalization...However, I think they got a little bit carried away....I'm talking about the support for SQL queries. Best practices dictate a clear separation between Presentation, Business Logic and Database tiers. They realize that, as they state that large applications should use other means (DAOs, EJBs, etc) to access database. But, even for simple applications I find their usefulness very limited...
What is a simple application ? One that is small ? One that we want to write as fast as possible ? It really can be faster and smaller in some cases (one can have a custom taglib that based on a SQL query can automatically generate an HTML table). But I think sooner or later one have to do some maintenance to the application. And even in this kind of applications we will have more work changing things done this way, than with a clear separation between presentation and database.
But overall, a useful set of tag libraries, as I said before.