I'm just wading into the HA waters with Postgres. I somewhat understand the tradeoffs between simplicity and robustness, but what would be your recommendation on how to proceed for someone who is a newbie?
Any consultant worth their day (let alone week) rate should be also able to refer you to previous clients, from whom you can hopefully get some sense of how satisfied people are with the candidate's work.
And, ultimately, there's an intuition factor at work here. It's been my consistent experience that if a candidate gives you some kind of hinky vibe, don't use them. When folks I've worked with haven't followed that, the results have pretty reliably been poor, at best.