What's the difference between a query hint and a planner hint?

> automatic planner adjustment when true cost was off

More often than not, this "automatic adjustment" makes things worse.

> active-active clustering with RAC

But it's still shared storage, which doesn't really make it a true cluster in my opinion

> out of the box backup tooling

While this is true, there are several (free) backup tools that are easy to install and use and can rival rman's features.