As long as you consider "can just fail if it gets too busy" to be "predictable." Which I don't. I'd rather see reliable operation than "predictable except for

As long as you consider "can just fail if it gets too busy" to be "predictable." Which I don't. I'd rather see reliable operation than "predictable except for when it fails outright" in almost every situation. If you've encountered that other situation, where failures are fine? Then great. But I still assert that's a tiny minority of real-life DB use cases.