> outweighs a poorly designed storage layer, poorly designed column formats, and a terrible SQL implementation

You're going to have to expand on that, because I have no idea what you're talking about, nor does anyone else here seem to.

It's a relational database meant primarily for a single user. It's SQL. It works as expected. It's performant. It's astonishingly reliable.

The only obviously questionable design decision I'm aware of is for columns to be able to mix types, but that's more "differently designed" rather than "poorly designed", and it's actually fantastic for automatically saving space on small integers. And maybe the fact ALTER TABLE is limited, but there are workarounds and it's not like you'll be doing that much in production anyways.

What are your specific problems with it?