Back in the day you could whip together an app like this using Borland's dev tools in literally a matter of minutes, and it worked with any data source configured on your system.
And I think there's a YouTube video that has Steve Jobs demoing that same sort of data access using only Interface Builder on NeXTSTEP.
ODBC is fairly complex (both to work against and to implement providers for) and is very much tied to relational databases.
It's also unevenly implemented: On Windows there's native Microsoft-provided ODBC (but in terms of focus it has been superceded by ADO, which superceded OLE DB, which was supposed to be the replacement for ODBC — it's not like Microsoft ever settles on a single technology), and on Unix there's UnixODBC. I don't know about the driver quality; I suspect Windows ODBC drivers are quite good, whereas JDBC has been favoured by the server/enterprise world for a while, and I would not be surprised if UnixODBC drivers were a bit behind the times.
As for the Borland dev tools, they also used their own proprietary data source tech: The BDE (Borland Database Engine), which had an ODBC bridge built in. I remember being quite fed up with the BDE at the time, and eventually started using a set of native ODBC components that someone developed.
Cocoa does have a sort of rich data framework that you refer to: Core Data. Unfortunately it's quite complex, and not really designed to be a common interface to databases, but rather a sort of data abstraction layer where you work with objects and never see any SQL.
Back in the day you could whip together an app like this using Borland's dev tools in literally a matter of minutes, and it worked with any data source configured on your system.
And I think there's a YouTube video that has Steve Jobs demoing that same sort of data access using only Interface Builder on NeXTSTEP.
What am I missing?