[ComputerGuru]

A supporting point and a counterpoint:

* Good database drivers will let you pipeline multiple queries concurrently (esp. in languages with async support), effectively eliminating the _N_x roundtrip cost (you can even execute them in parallel if you use multiple connections, not that I recommend doing that). But obviously this is only doable where the queries are independent of one another; I use this mainly to perform query splitting efficiently if the join key is already known.

* These days databases are often effectively versioned alongside the code anyway, at least for either smaller projects that "own" the database, eliminating the biggest issue with stored procedures.