You're putting words in my mouth that I didn't say. I don't like MySQL. I prefer PostgreSQL. And I have had a few rough times optimizing some queries in PostgreSQL, whereas I've had fewer such bad times with MySQL, despite using it more often. It's anecdata. Take it for what it's worth.

Time sinks in MySQL have come more from its crappy defaults, from its bizarre error handling (or lack thereof) in bulk imports, and most recently, a regression caused by a null pointer in the warning routine.

If I were working on my own project, I'd probably go with PostgreSQL and figure out the replication story. But I'm not. I do use PostrgeSQL on my personal projects.

(If there was one feature I'd add to PostgreSQL, it would be some means of temporarily and selectively disabling referential integrity. Not deferring it, not removing and readding foreign keys, just disabling. The app I work on does regular 10k-1M+ row bulk inserts, usually into a new table every time (10s of thousands of tables), but sometimes appending to an already 100M+ row table. It would be nice to have referential integrity outside of the bulk inserts, but not pay the cost on bulk insert.)