I work remotely and I've decided that ON is the right choice for me. I made this choice when I started joining a lot of calls where they had to be in English because of me. I figured camera on was a good way to show I was paying attention.
However one of the perks of being a male is that society only ever expects me to take a shower to be presentable. So I'm totally cool if a colleague wants to leave the camera off even if it's a 1 on 1.
You are correct, it is a disk-format issue, and MySQL officially supports in-place upgrade between versions.
It's actually quite hard to fix bugs in charset/collations, because any changes to the sort order implicitly could affect the on-disk format (indexes are sorted).
One detail that is not always obvious is how much work goes into limiting regressions. The work to switch to utf8mb4 really started in MySQL 5.6 by not allocating the sort buffer in full (and then further improved in 5.7). 8.0 then added a new temptable storage engine for variable length temp tables.
These are not small cases either: When you compare to latin1 because the _profile_ of queries could change from all in memory to on disk, we could be talking about 10x regressions. In MySQL 8.0 it is more like 11% https://www.percona.com/blog/2019/02/27/charset-and-collatio...
Edit: Also forgot to mention, switching the default character set broke over 600 tests. It's not as easy as it sounds!
Morgan from the TiDB team here. We are working on at rest encryption now - stay tuned.
w.r.t. nested transactions, this is not something that MySQL currently offers (TiDB is MySQL 5.7 compatible). Sometimes this is emulatable via savepoints, which is a feature we plan to add in the future.
Prioritization is based on a few things (customer demand, trends in the market in general). Besides prioritization, there is a resourcing component too (the server is split into several teams with specific expertise).
In general I would say that we like to understand the use case more than the feature :) If the workaround viability is low, the priority goes up.
However one of the perks of being a male is that society only ever expects me to take a shower to be presentable. So I'm totally cool if a colleague wants to leave the camera off even if it's a 1 on 1.