There have been calls to move toward jsonb, as well as a pull request for newer v8, but development seems to have stalled.

> If we can address fields with operators (->, ->>, etc.) then why can't those operators modify, too? It works for everything else, after all. It's fairly counter-intuitive from a dev perspective.

It certainly doesn't work for "everything else". You can update individual "parts" of arrays and record types, that's it. And those exception are hard-coded, so someone would either have to hard-code similar exceptions for JSON values (ugly, inflexible, generally a bad idea) or generalize support for custom operators on the left-hand side of assignments in UPDATE. All this while trying to push out a release which was already late by months.

You can call everything an oversight, but with very limited resources available and the need to cut a release at some point, this is far from the truth in this case.

That wouldn't change even if there was a specialized syntax, because of MVCC. So the only problem is that syntactic sugar is lacking, not that the performance isn't as good as it could be.