People are saying (with gasps of amazement) that they can replace 4-6 proprietary SP for each table and make it backend dependent

Hopefully you realize that under one situation, a 1-4 relationship "could" be a sign that the sprocs were generated with very few parameters. So a factor of 4 or even 6 might be rather impressive - or a sign of something a bit more embarrassing.

Backend dependent - I'll go on record - overrated. Before anyone jumps on this, I'm not saying it doesn't have value - just not nearly as critical as some want to believe.

I know vertical market vendors who scrapped their development efforts to support many backends, because the cost-benefit just wasn't there.