PostgreSQL or MySQL (or something else)?

I'm writing a web application in Perl. Database Architecture is top of my planning list and would like /prog/'s opinions. The web application is an file upload host (LOL ORIGINALITY). But seriously, it won't be a general one like Rapidshare, it'll have a very specific target audience.

Anyway, I have seen /prog/ reccomend PostgreSQL numerous times with no reason other than "better than MySQL", though to be honest, MySQL seems like a daftly compacted pile of crap aimed squarely at the CONTENT MANAGEMENT SYSTEM and PHP ENTERPRISE FORUM market.

So I ask you, /prog/, which database engine should I use and why??

NLS: That's a lie, MySQL has great Unicode support
Bull. Shit.
I have still been entirely unable to get a rather large database I'm using converted entirely to utf-8, without having to rebuild the entire server, reconfigure it so that ALL tables are unicode, and then rebuild the database from scratch. I *thought* it was UTF-8 to begin with, but holy shit! Even though both the database and my connection were configured from the start to use UTF-8, somewhere else it was still in Latin-1 mode, so everything got mangled into Latin-1 reinterpreted as UTF-8. Why is there a difference? it should just put the data in the table, and stop defecating on it first.
I'm not saying that full Unicode isn't possible, but my experiences have been unpleasant. And before you say something like "diaf noob retard, you suck", I was reading the documentation thoroughly, and even had someone else (who had even held a job with AB for a couple years) next to me at the time. And it still ate my data. Fortunately I had a backup.
On the other hand, PostgreSQL just worked out of the box. SQLite just worked out of the box. Fucking Oracle worked out of the box. Why does MySQL have to do it some retarded way that breaks data by default?

then you can forget time zones ever existed
Oh goody gumdrops, that's such a fantastic idea! Let's have people understand less about what their code is doing. This smacks of PHP's magic_quotes_gpc among other braindead blunders. When will developers learn? In order to be an even marginally proficient sysadmin/coder/whatever, you NEED to understand what your code is doing -- and moreover, you need to know what your data is doing, not to have magic timezone conversion shit going on behind your back.