Quote Originally Posted by Adrestia View Post
Thankfully, that's code, and it can be rewritten.
Agreed, and this is where SE's $$$$ would actually make a difference - rewriting the database to fix whatever performance problems it has is a project better outsourced to a third party. SE has a bad tendency to pick the lowest bidder and get burned by doing this (see 1.0 and also their first stab at the FFVII Remake) - so they are probably wary of going this route. But getting a team of database experts to throw a few months at it outside of the core project for a few million dollars would let the main dev team focus on their game patches without wasting a year trying to learn how to improve the database in-house.

My office actually is in the process of doing this ourselves - we figured it was cheaper to buy a month of an expert's time to help us transition to Java 11 (we were still on 7... ugh) and also PostGres rather than waste six months of our own time to attempt it on our own and end up doing it badly.