It's true a better query planner is what I want, i.e. one that always does what I want it to do. That not being the case, I will settle for being in control, footguns and all.

I agree the config is hard to wrangle though, you effectively find yourself doing grid search with a bunch of common workloads, it does feel like something the machine should be doing for me (the most common config variable we end up tweaking is "how much money we give Amazon").