Except for niches, one is not going to unseat SQL as the primary de-facto standard relational query language unless the replacement is significantly better, not just slightly. Unless a fad storm kicks in, being slightly better is rarely enough to unseat an established standard.
As far as SQL competitor candidates, my personal favorite is SMEQL. It's more composable and uses tables for many operations instead of dedicated commands and syntax, making it more uniform where a handful of idioms do all the work instead of lots of specialized stuff for each task, like what SQL does.
In general it seems MySql targets start-ups while PostgreSql targets more established companies and projects. It's not necessarily about good-vs-bad, but using the right tool for the job.
Basically it's saying the MySql code base is a mess. Maybe PostgreSql's codebase is also a mess. Without experience inside it, it's hard to really say. Anybody here worked at both for a good while? Most code bases are messes in the real world, I hate to tell ya.
A better DOM. I know this topic is mostly about data transfer, but I'm going to complain about web UI standards. For many uses, a state-ful coordinate-based UI standard is needed. It's why PDF's proliferate: DOM can't faithfully reproduce documents in a WYSIWYG way. It's not practical for every document/content author to become a "semantic auto-flow" layout expert: the learning curve to do semantic right is too damned long. We could have things like interactive flow-charts and ERD diagrams with our favorite GUI widgets in them if we had a decent state-ful coordinate standard (and maybe the "missing" GUI idioms like combo boxes, tabs, editable grids, MDI, drop-down menus, etc. Reinventing them in JavaScript has proven a mess.)
I do a fair amount of grammar and spelling searches. Google often displays tips and examples. And typing "sp500" displays a stock chart right in Google itself. Google has a lot of "instant snippets" like that. Quite convenient. However, near-monopolies do make me nervous about supporting them.