> This gets to the heart of my problem with Prolog: it's sold as if it's logic programming - just write your first-order predicate logic and we'll solve it. But then to actually use it you have to understand how it's executed

Prolog is a logic-flavored programming language. I don't recall Prolog ever being "sold" as pure logic. More likely, an uninformed person simply assumed that Prolog used pure logic.

Complaining that Prolog logic doesn't match mathematical logic is like complaining that C++ objects don't accurately model real-life objects.