Hierarchical queries

For the last couple of days I am working on the new paper of ODTUG KScope'11 on how to appropriately work with hierarchical data. The reason I decided to open this topic was Oracle's introduction in 11g R2 an extended version of CTE (common table expressions) - or to call it simpler a recursive WITH-clause (here is a set of examples: link, another link). For years it was used in a number of RDBMS implementations (SQL Server, PostgreSQL etc), while Oracle people were using Oracle's own CONNECT-BY clause.

I understand, that compatibility with other platforms is a good thing - but I am still struggling to figure out why anybody in Oracle would care. Me and my co-worker Grigoriy Novikov are running a set of tests and will keep you posted whether there are any performance reasons (doesn't look like - yet), but even architecturally I am not 100% sure that I see the "25-words-or-less" case that would prove the existence of this feature.

To be fair, I know that I am biased - if the problem cannot be solved with simple SQL statement, I immediately build function that would return a result collection as an output and do all my processing in PL/SQL. Maybe this approach is limited - but this code I can give to my junior developers to maintain. Unfortunately, proposed solutions involving CTE (as far as I can see) are above the comprehension point of mere mortals... I appreciate the level of the knowledge of people providing such solutions - but I am still looking for a good "PL/SQL for Dummies"-level example.

To be continued!