MySQL feels more "modern" (in the context of the early 2000s when I started using it), in that it seemed to know it existed in an environment with other tools;

MySQL feels more "modern" (in the context of the early 2000s when I started using it), in that it seemed to know it existed in an environment with other tools; for example, authentication was handled internally and was unrelated to the system user (other than the clients usually using your system username as the default database username if you didn't specify one). Compare that with Postgres, which seemed very "old school", going so far as to assume it was the only thing a given server was doing. Connecting to postgres authenticated as your own user; creating a user was done with the `createuser` command (or similar, I don't remember what it was actually called), and not some namespaced `pg_createuser` command that would make it clear what it did. I also remember setting up MySQL replication with almost no effort whatsoever, and then in the same year trying to set up Postgres replication - which it didn't have. I was told by other postgres admins to "just set up a script to rsync the database over and over to the other server; then if your first server dies just start the second server up and it'll recover". This seemed like a wildly cavalier attitude towards uptime and reliability, not to mention generating a ridiculous amount of I/O and network traffic for minimal benefit.