My brother told me it took him more than a year of working on postgres to truly appreciate how many manhours have gone into it and how optimized it is for so many different kinds of situations... and that I will never be able to match it starting from scratch... and that avoiding theq SQL parsing and query planning isn't going to pay off when the data statistics change and my hardcoded solution becomes wrong... but he did understand the desire to have a much smaller thing without all the crap I'm not going to be using.