With all due respect, this is one of those "it's impressive because it was done at all" sorts of things. Seriously, if this is what your storage system forces you to do to compute the equivalent of:
It's true, it is kind of a PITA. Users of our VLA observation preparation tool can nest scans inside scan loops, and this is represented in the database with the self-referencing PK. In the tool we never really need to do the nasty recursive select, but occasionally I need to do them to do reports, and it's never a great joy.
That said, I'm glad I have the power, and I wouldn't throw away Postgres and switch to something else just because something else might store hierarchies more naturally. Postgres is not the perfect tool for every use case, but having hierarchical data by itself isn't enough reason to throw it away.
