So at first glance this looks pretty amazing, and you deserve kudos for your documentation quality alone!
2 comments. First, if you're going to lead with statements like "faster than x" - link to your benchmarks. They're not hard to find but I did have to go looking.
Second, the skipped "random read" test is a glaring red flag to me, and honestly raises far more concerns than a weak result would have (a weak microbenchmark result may or may not be important, and at worst is something to be considered in engineering, while but trust issues with a vendor are poison ).
I don't know why you skipped the test, maybe it was time, maybe you didn't think it important, maybe you got unusual results and want to retest.
But right now it looks like a footgun in what seems to be a very high quality release.
Larping as a dba now, and trust me many of us do know, and its a source of ongoing suffering, but we're often not developers and don't necessarily have the choice of tooling.
Right now the DB I'm paid to babysit provides cli tools that flip between tabular and k/v list output without making that configurable, or a tabular form that doesn't include headers, or a 3rd party tool that will, but has the spectacularly annoying "error on line 1 : multi-line query" issue. Or things that are slow or only talk via generic protocols like odbc etc etc etc
I think you're being a little unfair about the pipe delimited thing though, it's a least worst compromise based on who we're providing the data too - non technical business people, the vast majority of whom use excel or similar tools and couldn't even tell you what "data format" means, let alone configure their systems to parse something else.
Personally I had a bit of an epiphany around the ascii delimiters (us/fs/rs/gs) which work extremely well when the data is ascii/utf-8, and make data interchange between shell cli tools very easy. But they've also invisible and little business software supports them in a friendly way. Telling someone in accounts or market to "use octal 034" helps no one.
And I've resigned myself to using multiple tools, dev with tool 1 with decent error messages, tool 2 for production use because it can actually produce sane output formats.
What I don't have a choice on is which db we use, and it's not modern or cool and honest most things don't even have drivers for it
I suspect part of it is licensing games, both in the sense of "avoiding per core license limits" which absolutely matters when your DB is costing a million bucks, and also in the 'enable the highest PVU score per chassis' for ibm's own license farming.
Power systems tend not to be under the same budget constraints as intel, whether thats money, power, heat, whatever, so the cost benifit of adding more sub-core processing for incremental gains is likely different too.
I may have a raft of issues with IBM, and aix, but those Power chips are top notch.
Joking obviously, but only just.