PostgreSQL really needs hints. Sometimes I as the developer know better than the optimizer and having to trick the optimizer to get it to do what I want is a ridiculous situation.

Also having the optimizer decide to do something bad off hours is not a good situation again hints or plan locking would help here.

I really appreciate that in SQL Server we can just use query hints. I don't think I will ever see eye-to-eye with the PostgreSQL team on this. No query planner is perfect. SQL Server's planner certainly isn't. We have had the same sort of "query plan suddenly changes in production and everything breaks" incidents, but they are easily fixed with query hints and/or forced plans, and you can be sure that future statistics updates won't break them again.