As other comments have noted, direct costs were probably not the driving factor here. One place I worked benefited from great academic pricing on Oracle product

As other comments have noted, direct costs were probably not the driving factor here. One place I worked benefited from great academic pricing on Oracle products, and I was happy to have Oracle as our go-to vendor. But people with the knowledge to leverage the capabilities you mentioned are expensive (which is fine), and don't always go beyond 'being a good DBA' to develop an intuitive feel for the domain (e.g. biology or physics)