Gosh I remember when Postgres didn't have any streaming replication. That was a huge pain point. You had to manually ship the WAL files to the standby and use a trigger for fail-over... and pray that your standby is actually up to date.

The code in Postgres is written in a pragmatic, no-nonsense style and overall I'm quite happy with it. I've been bitten at times by run-away toast table bloat and the odd query plan misfire. But over all it's been a really solid database to work with.