That sounds like the worst of possible worlds! At $WORK we're also on mysql, but I don't know what I would do without engine-specific queries. For one, on complex JOINs, mysql sometimes gets the query plan spectacularly wrong, and even if it doesn't now, you can't be sure it won't in the future. So for many important queries I put the tables in the intended order and add a STRAIGHT_JOIN to future-proof it and skip query planner complexity.