This is not about Oracle versus postgres, it's about whether or not to use hints. My position is that needing hints indicates a failure of the database optimise

This is not about Oracle versus postgres, it's about whether or not to use hints. My position is that needing hints indicates a failure of the database optimiser. The optimiser theoretically should do a perfect job. In practice it doesn't, and never can so sometimes hints are necessary, but IME and speaking as an MSSQL guy, I very rarely need them.