Or I could use a hint to fix my query now and file a bug so it can be fixed at some unspecified point in the future so long as the developers agree I have a val

Or I could use a hint to fix my query now and file a bug so it can be fixed at some unspecified point in the future so long as the developers agree I have a valid use case. Sorry I have played that game before with SQL server back when it didn't have good hinting, having to fool the optimizer into getting a sane plan through trial and error and being at the mercy of waiting for a new release to fix the issue. Yes PG is better being open source, but fundamentally having dealt with this for many years relying on the optimizer with no manual override when needed is highly counter productive. There are way too many edge cases for any optimizer. As a human I can easily see the proper order of operations and indexes to use if only I could just tell that to the system. Most of the time you don't need to do this but its critical when you do and the system needs a way to do it.