I'll make it a point to keep giving it a whirl, if only to help out a fellow HN'er. I do agree that there's room for improvement in the desktop DB client world, but I've not run into the problems with e.g. Unicode, that you mentioned. This is probably just my personal use history (I work for Mapquest and spend a large amount of time doing geographic queries). As I said, I'll continue giving it a whirl as best as I can.

One thing that I have found virtually intolerable in any DB GUI client I've used is the latency after connection, presumably to load table definitions and other data for display. With psql, I connect and I just start going - the latency is imperceptible. I know that having such metadata readily visible is the reason people use GUI clients, but I find that I frequently don't need that. It's very easy for me to do a \d $tablename to see columns, or select count(1) from ... to get rowcounts as needed. In fact, the cost for doing this is roughly the same as the cost of clicking a table name to expand a schema in a GUI, so really all this sort of behavior does is get in my way.

Another thing which I would find enticing would be special attention to displaying query plans. The output of "explain" isn't exactly the clearest, even to someone who's got a pretty good idea how a DB works, and I run explain queries infrequently enough that I have to check the documentation to make sure I'm understanding the result. Even simple clues - e.g. color coding the output so sequential scans are red, for instance - would help.

Best of luck with it, though - and if I can help or if you want to bounce anything off me my e-mail is in my profile.