Hey Bob, I'm glad you're digging right into the security of Ubercart even as a newcomer. More eyes are a good thing.

In response to your question, the main reason is I didn't know those existed. I suppose now that I do, a second reason would be questions of compatibility. For example, can these functions be used in a shared hosting environment, do they work uniformly on all recent versions of MySQL, and is there a Postgres equivalent? We don't officially support Postgres, but we've been including contributed support from community users who use Postgres themselves.

I'd appreciate any insights you have.