The benchmarks in the article are obviously limited. For instance there was no accounting for read performance, or even moderately complex queries. Also given

The benchmarks in the article are obviously limited. For instance there was no accounting for read performance, or even moderately complex queries. Also given how fast performance was dropping off for the guids this would probably matter for any db that was doing 10k inserts over the course of any amount of time. A drop of of 30% write performance is extremely significant for even moderately sized applications. Also i don't think that the percentage of applications that need this level of performance and no more is as small as you think it is. plenty of successful businesses run critical application on SQL server (and other dbs) and this kind of degradation could be disastrous. I don't think the necessity for SQL tuning is as esoteric at all.