You experience is more a reflex on the nose-dive that management than what the tool/language is; including the Interbase engine, that was open-sourced then become closed fast.
Bad code is normal across enterprise applications, but even taking into account the RAD biased approach of the Delphi IDE is easy to do good coding. What is not easy is to have badly-trained developers doing massive amounts of code.
I know, because as moderator in Club Delphi, we answer A LOT of question about VERY BASIC stuff. Is amazing the amount of people that use Delphi (or JS, or .NET or PHP... we have sections for that too!) without read even a basic book or some decent basic entry-level tutorials/documentation.
I have thousands of answers that are mostly, "Please read http://www.delphibasics.co.uk/ (or similar)".
And about databases? Dammit, I don't know who is the bastard to blame in turn one of the easiest thing to learn and convince everyone "Nah! how wanna spend 20 minute of basic SQL/Relational fundamentals? Just write sql dammit!".
The other bulk of questions I help is about SQL...