[niftich]

I agree with your points about typical database usage. Could it be that some of the people who reach for a database don't in fact know what a particular database implementation (like Mongo, or MySQL, or Redis) actually does, and they're just looking for a black-box that holds data at rest and occasionally gives it back out?

[eldavido]

Yeah, maybe. But there's a bigger point here and that's that software engineering is starting to become more of a "there's a way we do things" craft profession (like medicine, law, or architecture) vs. a "everything is from first principles all the time" endeavor. There's just too much stuff to know. You can't expect people to have deep experience with more than, say, 2-3 databases every decade.

So we have to rely to some extent on the experience of others and our own intuitions / less than perfect inferences.