this was common practice about 15 years ago, before people discovered that putting biz logic in stored procs really sucked for UI interaction, sucked for maintainability (stored proc languages really suck), and truly sucked for scalability.
It sucks yes, but working at a place where there are a groups of people that commonly access the database to do operations that cannot be done from the front end you definitely want procedures. They use different tools for a variety of tasks and when the business logic isn't in procedures its very easy for them to break things and they have and do.... Our DBA however wants all procedures for all access which I find to also be an extreme example for the reasons you mention as not all data needs this level of control as its just simple CRUD operations and tables they should never change anyways.
