Erik Darling isn’t satisfied with “good enough”:
Query tuning is hard work, especially when queries run for a long time and you have to test various changes trying to get it down to a reasonable runtime.
There are, of course, things you pick up intuitively over time, and figuring out where problems in actual execution plans has gotten easier with operator runtimes.
Beyond basic query tuning intuition comes the really creative stuff. The stuff you’re amazed anyone ever thought of.
Click through for two really interesting examples.