I think the parent may have meant the opposite of how you interpreted it... That writing a tsd db from scratch doesn't match what you just stated about investing engineering time where it makes the most sense.
* analyze every datapoint you receive
* when the dimensional cardinality is high
* you want to analyze behaviors over time (e.g. the output depends on the orders of events followed - like creating a funnel report)
There's no off-the-shelf solution that does this at the scale at which we operate - hence the need to write our own custom solution.