You're welcome to read frustratingly. I didn't think hard about the word choice.

I suppose disturbingly is meant to imply "It was frustrating to me, and I think it would be frustrating to anyone in the situation of seriously using Postgres on RDS[1], and perhaps it ought to even decrease their opinion of the RDS team's ability to prioritize and ship features that are production-ready".

Does that make sense?

[1]: There was no workaround for getting a read replica. RDS doesn't allow you to run replication commands. So your options were "Don't use Postgres on RDS, or don't run queries against up-to-date copies of databases." There was never any announcement of when read replicas were coming. It was arguably irresponsible of them to release Postgres on RDS as a product and then wait a year to support read replicas, which is a core feature that other DB backends had already.

Without insight into what the AWS RDS team workload and priorities are, I think it's unfair to use a term like disturbingly. Sure, as a user, we want features to be rolled out as quickly as possible. From what I've seen, Postgres RDS support has been slow, but consistently getting better: nothing to warrant suggesting Amazon isn't serious about continuing to improve their Postgres offering. That would be disturbing. Or data loss failures. Slower-than-I'd-like roll-out of new features? Frustrating.

By all means, RDS isn't perfect. It doesn't suit my current needs. But I understand that getting these things to work in a managed way that suits the needs of most customers is not an easy task. I'll remain frustrated in some small way until RDS does suit my needs. I hope they continue to add features to give customers more flexibility. And from what I've seen, they likely will.