[aeyes]

As a DBA I have a very hard time properly tuning parameters like random_page_cost and the default of 4.0 is no longer applicable for most database servers.

I don't want to be tuning this, it takes a lot of time to do it properly and I haven't retested this in a long time. I just set something that has worked in the past which is probably bad.

I completely agree that Postgres should be able to figure this out on its own. This is just an example, there are more such parameters which should be adjusted to the hardware but most people will leave the defaults.