While I don't disagree with you, I think you're might be missing a higher level difference: many of todays teams are pulling functionality OUT of the storage en

While I don't disagree with you, I think you're might be missing a higher level difference: many of todays teams are pulling functionality OUT of the storage engine entirely, and 'rolling their own' in the application code. I'm not passing judgement on if that's a good thing or not, but many teams I see today are looking at the storage engine as nothing but that: a temporary place to put things that can be swapped out if there's something that does the same job faster, where 'job' is glorified K:V and possibly sorting. Ceding advanced functionality to the database is what is being avoided: my own app code is usually easier to troubleshoot than an obscure Oracle error.