Disclaimer: I hate doing ops, but I’ve been in a position to actively hate doing it fairly regularly for several years of my career. My perspective is as a person who doesn’t want to deal with any of this kind of stuff. So I’ve probably failed to acquire knowledge which would make it less frictionful for me, purely from lack of interest.

RDS has some significant downsides which I would personally consider no go if I were in a position to evaluate it. The one which stands out as particularly painful from my past experience is… it’s excruciatingly slow to provision or make configuration changes. Like lose whole days of work to a few iterations of trial and error slow. Combined with AWS’ sprawling and inscrutable set of authorization and configuration options, the weird idiosyncrasies between most of their offerings, and the absolutely opaque naming applied to most of those offerings… trying to use RDS effectively as a managed database service felt more to me like becoming a full time ops professional.