MS and Oracle also have large teams of people that work full-time on improving the optimizer. With, the handful of people with the skills and inclination to work on the Postgres optimizer don't view hints as a high priority.
there is a difference between statements : (typical marketing style BS coverup of missing feature) "you don't need hints" and (honest) "we think that our limited resources should be all working on optimizer. In our view the priority of a few percent of cases where hints are necessary is much less than the rest that is covered by optimizer".
The latter shows that the people are rational and open to reason. The former shows that ideology and resulting BS byproduct have overtaken the project.
I agree that saying that hints have zero value is silly, but the blog post is just Josh's opinion. If you read the discussions on this topic on the pgsql-hackers list, you'll find a more balanced view.
