[franckpachot]

All those methods are try and guess. With hints you can have a scientific approach to understand why the bad plan has been chosen and find the right plan. Then, you can address the root cause. join_collapse_limit=1 may set the join order but not the join direction, so that's not enough if cardinality is misestimated. And pg_hint_plan can set this parameter for one statement if that's what you want, better than setting for the transaction