How are the team members funded? I was surprised to write a suggestion a few months ago and got replies from Tom Lane & Bruce Momjian themselves.
Since honesty is a theme of this thread, let's be real here. PgSQL is popular now only because Oracle killed MySQL.
This is not to denigrate the work of the Postgres team -- it's easily one of the best-managed open-source projects and my admiration for them is immense -- but ~95% of the time, the tech stack is chosen as a fashion statement.
MySQL was fashionable until Oracle showed up. Postgres has been trucking along for decades and has essentially won by default. I don't know if there are many great marketing insights to take away, other than "stay out of the way of the $50B gorilla".
In my 'world', MySQL was seen as an amateur database engine, and never really lost that label. There was some serious hesitation towards Postgres back-then, but eventually it became a good alternative to the commercial RDBMS's. I know we eventually switched everything over. Until the mid 2000's - our server-side software was still sold as a 'blackbox', managed by us, with no mention of it running linux and postgres, but eventually these became more accepted technologies, and towards many of our clients even a selling point. The rise of Redhat in the enterpricy world helped a lot with that.
Yes, Postgres adoption and development really picked up steam once Oracle acquired MySQL and quickly confirmed everybody's fears: they bought it primarily to ensure that MySQL stayed something of a "toy" database.
But the "fashion" thing is needless, insulting, and not even correct in my opinion. As far as mindless fashion trends in the industry go, traditional RDBMS's like Postgres are almost the antithesis of fashion.
The grandparent was asking what we can learn from Postgres in terms of driving adoption, as I understood it. And the reality is that most of Postgres's recent adoption uptick is because there really aren't many other options. It's not a good example of driving adoption in a crowded market, etc.
My apologies for being unclear before, and thanks for pointing it out so I can try to clarify.