Flaws in Using BPEL to implement Orchestration Engine than Using BPEl to Orchestrate a Process Flow

BPEL provides a Web Service Orchestration language. Like any basic programming language, it has some constructs for declaring variables, switching, looping, sequencing or parallel branching, etc. Due to this construct, some times I came across implementation where BPEL is used as a programming language implementing an Orchestration Engine itself than an orchestration language. In this case, the flow sequence is captured as a model in database tables and then BPEL process is an engine which uses the model in the tables to get the next activity. So it kind of "implementing an orchestration" engine in BPEL rather than Orchestrating in BPEL. Isn't it cool? or Are there any issues? Yes, in prima-facie it looks like cool, creative and innovative. However, you would need to think about what BPEL orchestration is, how would compensation work? how about fault handling? how can you view the process itself, whether you would be able to meaningfully monitor the process? In most of the scenarios, the answers to these questions would steer you away from using BPEL as a programming language