[pmiller2]

Fine, my example is outdated. That's irrelevant. I could probably find 3 more examples in the current default config for MySQL that would be as bad or worse.

As for the rest of your comment, sensible defaults most certainly are a valid reason to choose one piece of software over another. Bad default configs are equivalent to what the Dungeons & Dragons community calls "newbie traps." They're things that either don't look important, or don't look like they'll hurt you, but really are important, or can hurt you, if you're not extremely careful. What's more, some of these options are probably not going to be backward compatible with your code. So, you get into this situation where MySQL is doing shitty things you don't want it to do, and, when you find out later that it's doing those things, you either can't do much about it, or doing something about it involves major surgery to your application. That's bad.

So, yes, you can configure MySQL to have better than default behavior. That's no surprise; that's literally the point of having configuration options, after all. The problem is that some of these options don't look too bad. There is something to be said for having a permissive configuration. But, for the reasons I spelled out in the previous paragraph, that shouldn't be the default configuration. It's not too much to ask that you should be able to install and configure a database and not have it lose or corrupt your data.