[dumbfounder]

My gut says it's a resource issue. Oracle has the time and money to optimize a gajillion scenarios that increase performance without making developers think things through. Which makes the product easier to use and seem faster. It's very simple to code this one, but then there are 10,000 other cases you need to code too to make it cover a large percentage of potential optimizations.

[refset]

Indeed, Postgres may be wildly popular these days thanks to being $free, but it's far from being the most intelligent relational database engine on offer.