>>10
it lacks standard RDBMS features and is fucking slow for anything remotely complicated
What in the fuck, are you still living 10 years ago? That was MySQL 3.23. MySQL 5.0 is fully ACID-compliant with several storage engines, supports unions, subqueries, foreign keys, stored procedures/functions/triggers (though they suck), views, and strict data types, and it has a better optimizer and you don't need to lock before writing securely; in fact, InnoDB doesn't even lock reads when writing to the same row.