Why does everyone run ancient Postgres versions?

Upgrades are hard. There was no replication in the before times. The original block-level replication didn't work among different major versions. Slony was a painful workaround based on triggers that amplified writes.

Newer PostgreSQL versions are better. Yet still not quite as robust or easy as MySQL.

At a certain scale even MySQL upgrades can be painful. At least when you cannot spare more than a few minutes of downtime.

I've always wondered why Postgres is so insanely popular. I mean it has some nice things like very powerful support for a very comprehensive subset of SQL functionality, but most apps don't need all that.

It really feels like early 1990s vintage Unix software. It's clunky and arcane and it's hard to feel confident doing anything complex with it.

> It really feels like early 1990s vintage Unix software. It's clunky and arcane and it's hard to feel confident doing anything complex with it.

How software "feels" is subjective. Can you be more specific?

The command line experience is old school style i.e. to show tables.

  \c database
  \dt

Versus:

  use database
  show tables

I started with MySQL in 2006 for my personal projects, but what first won me over to psql was those commands.

Today I use CLIs like usql to interact with MySQL and SQLite so I can continue to use those commands.

At first glance they may be less obvious, but they are significantly more discoverable. \? Just shows you all of them. In MySQL it always feels like I need to Google it.