Declarative Programming - A Blessing or a Curse?

Having been a software developer for many years, I have seen a lot of technology come and go. In the early days, I did a lot of programming in assembly language. While it's a lot of fun to be close to the hardware, sometimes it's hard to find bugs when your code is running "off in the weeds". Modern operating systems and frameworks have largely solved this problem, but I have been considering a new issue recently. Is declarative programming really a good thing? Just because we can put something in an XML file and code gets generated, does not always mean that our lives will be easy. What if something goes wrong? Where is the problem? How do I debug it? As an example, I was recently working on a ListView in an ASP.NET application. Creating the templates for inserting, editing, and displaying items is great and setting up the SQL statements to manipulate items is pretty easy. However, in one of my insert statements, I used the word "value" instead of "values". There was never an indication that anything was wrong - no error messages - just no results! Of course, there is probably a tool that will help me out in this situation, but I am not aware of it right now. In this model, there isn't always a good way to debug stuff and I am one who likes control. Maybe I just need some counseling :)