We do indeed have SRID support, but there are still some functions that only support Cartesian spatial reference systems. Is that what you're thinking about? I'm curious to know which functions you're trying to use that don't support your use case.
We are working to close these holes. In many cases it involves extending Boost Geometry (the library that we use) with more geographical computations, and that is hard and time consuming work. But we're doing it. The work we have to do to support it in MySQL once it's in Boost Geometry is pretty simple and straight forward.
Since extending Boost Geometry is such a time consuming task, people not working on those tasks have time to extend MySQL in other directions, maybe giving the impression that we're avoiding adding the missing parts. But it's just a result of some task being simple and fast to implement, while others (especially adding geography support) are more long running. In any case, the result is an uneven trickle of new functionality in more or less every new version of MySQL.
I hope that explains a bit what you're seeing. We are filling in the blanks, but it takes time to get to 100%.
Geographic ST_Distance is currently limited to points and multipoints because of limitations in Boost Geometry, but we've got that fixed in Boost now, so full type support should soon arrive also in MySQL.
Norvald has a few slide sets, which might be good addition to docs: https://www.slideshare.net/mobile/NorvaldRyeng There are also blogs on https://mysqlserverteam.com/category/gis/
Without details about your experiments it's hard to find the issue ...
Apparently they don't need the support from their pov at all. If will is there they could build up MySQL 8. MySQL 8 is out for a while and ahs seen good testing in different production workloads.
> developers already wanted to drop MySQL and just wanted an excuse
This seems to be the true reason. And it's valid. Supporting many variations of systems and architectures is hard. Supporting combinations you don't use yourself, while using something else intensively is hard.
Personally I think a system like this would benefit from many of the recent replication improvements in MySQL 8, which help in scaling and HA. But I'm obviously biased ;)