> This is using several buzzwords some database vendors are already using to promote their fully managed solutions, yet the "autonomy" of this dbms appears to be limited to SQL tuning.

This is incorrect. Where did you get this impression? We are trying to support automated physical design, knob configuration tuning, SQL tuning, and capacity planning/scaling.

Please refer to our vision paper: https://db.cs.cmu.edu/papers/2017/p42-pavlo-cidr17.pdf