I remember in the early-mid aughts I evaluated Postgres vs MySQL. At the time the conventional wisdom seemed to be that Postgres was focusing more on robustness and MySQL more on functionality. And a lot of people seemed to prefer MySQL because of this.

When I looped back around several years later Postgres had started to overcome MySQL. Conventional wisdom then was it was roughly at feature parity with MySQL but more robust.

So it would seem that working on having a robust inner core first paid off, even if it cost some early reputation.