[kstrauser]

If your data's large and changing enough that you have to care about vacuuming, any reasonable database is going to require some tuning, tending and management.

I'd posit that only a tiny fraction of PostgreSQL uses have to know or care that vacuuming is a thing because the autovacuum default handle it for them.

[mardifoufs]

Sure, it's never going to be plug and play, but it doesn't mean that all the issues will be equivalent. Vacuuming doesn't really have an equivalent in say, MySQL. It's something you don't have to worry about if you use the latter.

For example, HA and clustering will always be challenging to deploy/maintain, but you will still have a harder time doing that with postgres than with MySQL. Postgres also has a lot of benefits obviously, though.