Comment by RaftPeople

Tangent:

> PostgreSQL developers are oposed to query execution hints, because if a human knows a better way to execute a query, the devs want to put that knowledge into the planner.

This thinking represents a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of the problem (query plan optimization).

Query plan optimization is a combinatorial problem combined with partial information (e.g. about things like cardinality) that tends to produce worse results as complexity (and search space) increases due to limited search time.

Avoiding hints won't solve this problem because it's not a solvable problem any more than the traveling salesperson is a solvable problem.