Does anybody else feel that the syntax is terrible and SQL is not a good fit for this? I, for one, would appreciate if the paths were accessible via a change to

Does anybody else feel that the syntax is terrible and SQL is not a good fit for this? I, for one, would appreciate if the paths were accessible via a change to the SQL syntax as opposed to a magic operator or - even worse - a new function. Not to mention that the more complex the queries become, the more pain one can expect the query planner to be... personally, I'd prefer to make my own query plans instead, laying down the algorithms according to the best of my knowledge of the dataset. It's not like optimizing in C, where the compiler looks at the AST and can actually discover something you wouldn't think of. My experience with PostgreSQL's query planner is that it requires so much fine-tuning it's near unusable and super quirky. That isn't to say that I don't like PostgreSQL and its JSON capabilities - it's just that the more I use it, the more I wish there was something between it and current NoSQL databases...