From first principles, it seems reasonable to expect transformations to go in a linear order. From there you look for ways to minimize special cases (eg why is `where` different from `having`?). Then you can just layer on some quality of life things which would appear to a designer after five minutes of real-world use (dear god, please let me have trailing commas).

I would expect there to be a lot of convergent evolution as how to go from a pile of data to narrowing on what you want.