You got downvoted, but I agree with you. Traditional RDBMS is inherently single-node and a pain to scale. The actual sad thing here is that there's no mature/reliable commodity (i.e. open source) distributed RDBMS for transaction processing yet.
IMO really the best option for distributed OLTP RDBMS/NewSQL right now is basically either Citus or Vitess, only because they are built on the backs of extremely mature databases. It really feels like all other options are not mature enough (except maybe VoltDB).
* Dependability. I can be completely certain that standard usage of the database won't lose my data or leave it in a bad state, at the very least.
* Community. There's an active IRC channel (or the like) where I can ask questions. When an error show up, I can Google it and easily find an applicable solution most of the time.
* Performance. Not just with synthetic (i.e. TPC-C, TPC-H, YCSB, etc.) workloads, but proven to have reasonably satisfactory QPS in many/most real production settings.
* Ecosystem. There's a good collection of first-party (and also ideally third-party) tools, constantly being improved. (Mere wire-compatibility with MySQL or Postgres might be good, but probably isn't enough, since 100% wire compatibility seems rare.)
I still believe in Curt Monash's cardinal rule of RDBMS development: http://www.dbms2.com/2013/03/18/dbms-development-marklogic-h...