Wow, as someone who feels like I'm decently familiar with the ins and outs of Postgres, I thought this was a great article and I learned a ton.
It seems like one of the biggest fundamental flaws is that Postgres chose the O2N approach for tracking row versions instead of N2O. While switching to N2O wouldn't solve all problems (e.g. the article also talks about how Postgres stores full row copies and not just diffs), from an "80/20 rule" perspective, it seems like it would get rid of most of the downsides with the current implementation. For example, I'd assume that the vast majority of the time that transactions want the latest row version, so using the N2O ordering means you could probably do away with storing each row version in an index, as you'd only need to traverse the linked list of you needed an older version, which should be much less common.
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