I remember in the early-mid aughts I evaluated Postgres vs MySQL. At the time the conventional wisdom seemed to be that Postgres was focusing more on robustness and MySQL more on functionality. And a lot of people seemed to prefer MySQL because of this.
When I looped back around several years later Postgres had started to overcome MySQL. Conventional wisdom then was it was roughly at feature parity with MySQL but more robust.
So it would seem that working on having a robust inner core first paid off, even if it cost some early reputation.
Postgres started in 1986. its was never less featureful than MySQL...in fact MySQL tried to get by without _transactions_ for the longest time. the fact that MySQL had more market/mindshare at any point is more of a testament about crowd mentality than anything about either of the two databases.
I remember maybe circa 2004 debating Postgres and mysql with a colleague. I told him to unplug the machine that was hosting his mysql instance. He did and corrupted his database. He said it didn't matter, he had backups, speed was more important :p This was before mysql had the innodb storage engine, after that it wasn't so bad. I have always stood by Postgres though, it's a fantastic piece of open source software.
Sorry - I said functionality but meant performance. Doesn't look I can edit my post anymore. I don't know if that was even true, but that was what the wisdom of the crowds said at the time.
MySql did have better insert performance for a while, but this was due to unsafe defaults in conjunction with no transactions, which is only a good tradeoff if you're storing disposable data.
When I looped back around several years later Postgres had started to overcome MySQL. Conventional wisdom then was it was roughly at feature parity with MySQL but more robust.
So it would seem that working on having a robust inner core first paid off, even if it cost some early reputation.