> Today was my first real usage of PostGres

Then let us welcome you with some pedantry! Postgres or PostgreSQL, but never PostGres or--FSM forbid--PostGreSQL.

More seriously,

> fdw looks easy to start, but probably hard to master it.

Yep, like a number of Postgres features, such as user-defined types and user-defined aggregates. It's a great system, and not nearly as stuffy or hard to use as you may have heard.