These are all good points that you make. It seems that your inclination tends to favor the Big Three DBMS vendors in terms of functionality. And I tend to agree. But MySQL is not the only open source DBMS out there (though it is the most popular). Now that CA has released Ingres into open source there is a DBMS out there that can come close to competing functionality-wise with the Big Three. Of course, Oracle/SQL Server/DB2 have been modified and updated more actively than Ingres even when it was a commercial offering.

I know that there are open source supporters out there though. So please post a reply here. We'd love to hear you perspective on things (especially if you've also used one of the Big Three recently).