Nothing, really. COBOL is the way it is by design. It is not something that its creators should be expected to regret to have done this way and not the other. The language was designed to serve a specific purpose, and it has served well. Look at SQL (which originally stood for "Structured-English Query language"). It shares some important features with COBOL (being "structured English", having easy-to-understand semantics), and, of course, just like COBOL, it often meets some harsh criticisms. I think that bringing both languages together (and I am not talking about Embedded SQL here) could result in a kind of "happy marriage" - in that one would get a pretty powerful tool for doing stuff on a computer without having to learn complex control and data structures - let alone things like macros, generics, iterators and such. I have met people who struggled with Visual Basic and who would certainly struggle with such languages as Python, but who have enough intuition and logical abilities to make it possible for their untrained intelligence to successfully create useful programs in COLBOL and SQL - not unlike non-programmers showing the ability to use, say, Microsoft Excel, very skillfully and efficiently (which, I must say, not every programmer can do; incidentally, I have also met professional programmers who struggled with programming subjects I'd thought were easy to understand!).

Primarily, the irritating verbosity, which still exists in modern cobol. In addition, it has many frustrating features and misfeatures, which may have made sense at the time, but definitely don't now. Modern COBOL has much of the same, but at least there are alternatives to many of the more awkward bits.