I feel the same way about Postgres. It's powerful but it's insanely arcane and full of land mines and footguns. It's great for forcing you to hire consultants, DBAs, or pay cloud providers a lot to run it for you.

Which SQL RDBMS isn't, though? Postgres is a breeze compared to someting like DB2. High-performance relational databases just seem to be an inherently arcane target.

MySQL and SQLite, but the former is not a real transactional database, it's quite a joke compared to Postgres. The latter is a file based database. We use MySQL at work and I am exasperated by it. It's possible that even Firebird is better.

If Postgres is unnecessary arcane, then surely MySQL is that squared, given all the legacy traps? You know, stuff like "utf8" not actually being UTF-8.

What exactly do you miss in MySQL compared to Postgres? With InnoDB it can do transactions, no?

Proper transactions, like the ones that aren't closed by create, alter or drop table, proper rollbacks, statement timeouts so that a single stalled statement doesn't block the table until you kill it, subscribe/notify among other things. My issue is primarily with performance under load, where you'll eventually end up with lots of blocked queries and an unresponsive database and the only way to solve it is to throw hardware resources at it.

Do yourselvs a favour and pick Postgres for new projects. If you properly vacuum your tables you'll probably be fine.

CockroachDB is probably the best example of a modern RDBMS.

Is it ACID?

You know it. SERIALIZABLE + no stale reads. https://www.cockroachlabs.com/blog/consistency-model/