Why? I'm genuinely curious, since I've never worked with kdb but I've often heard great things about it (regardless of the weird query language).

Kdb is like oracle db that somehow won’t die. It could use some competition

Standard SQL is rubbish for time series queries as it is based on set theory which does not have order. Most SQL datbases exploit that fact to increase performance. Fundamentally kdb is based on ordered lists, which is a much better paradigm for time series data.

The contrasting queries can be seen here: http://www.timestored.com/b/kdb-qsql-query-vs-sql/

I do agree they could use competition as the overall offering is weak but the core database is very strong.

Have you checked questdb [1]? the data structure is arrays with data that lands in order and SQL queries on top. The fallback was that it was difficult to deal with out of order data, but we have just solved this by re-ordering data on the fly in memory before it hits the disk. Performance wise probably not far from kdb itself (will be sharing some bench results soon vs open source tsdbs)

NB: I'm one of the co-founder of questdb [1] https://www.questdb.io

TimescaleDB isn't an alternative to KDB+. KDB+ is more a programming platform than a database.

I just do not want to be forced to use kdb/k/q ever again

An alternative is to build a system on a top of data warehousing technology, but it's very tough, so many stuff built on top of KDB+, I think it will stay for there for next two decades.

Can you provide a discussing on why / why not? Not necessarily here, but somewhere? Very interested to hear.