10 Fears about the Future of the DBMS Field

Fear #1 - The hollow middle - the number of papers in SIGMOD deal with the core database system stuff is slowly declining in recent years, from 100% in 1977 to 47% in 2017. The conclusion is, we are drifting into "applications" - all the core becomes increasingly well understood. But the applications (NLP, autonomous vehicles, complex analytics) don't have anything to do with each other. We are moving to a world where nothing binds us together except 200 researchers looking favorably on each others' papers, from bifurcation to multi-furation!
Fear #2 - We have been abandoned by our customers. The industry types have largely disappeared, presumably because DBMS research conferences are no longer relevant to their needs. We have become disconnected from the real world.
Fear #3 - Diarrhea of papers. A Ph.D. applicant who wants to get a good academic job should have ~10 papers. A tenure case should have ~40 papers. And there are around 10X the number of researchers, i.e. 100X the number of papers. Nobody can keep up with this deluge. Everybody divides their papers into least publishable units (LPU's). A student has to grind out ~10 papers in 3-4 years. Any serious implementation is impossible in this climate. Postgre would be impossible in this climate. Way too much work for too few publications.
Fear #4 - Reviewing is getting very random. Quality stinks, huge program committees, the overwhelming crush of papers. Leads to revise and resubmit (R&R) mentality. Which is killing both the submitters and the reviewers.
Fear #5 - Research taste has disappeared (customer leaving and whale replacement) - the acceptance and subsequent rejection of MapReduce from Google. We are way too uncritical of the whales. People who don't understand history will be condemned to repeat it.
Fear #6 - We are polishing a round ball - 10% papers are not worth reading, and implementation.
Fear #7 - Irrelevant theory is taking over. It's very difficult to get system papers accepted. Seemingly because they have no theory. Real world doesn't share data. So do the whales. Systems papers are becoming more artificial.
Fear #8 - We are ignoring the most important problems. In favor of ones that are easy to solve. Driven by the need for quickies. A consequence of being detached from the real world. A field is defined to have "lost its way" when it forgets who the customer is.
Fear #9 - Research support is disappearing. NSF success rate down to 7%, and the mouths to feed is increasing. Industry is not picking up the slack. Without a healthy, aggressive, and innovative research community, we are "toast" in the long run.
Fear #10 - Student load. CS departments are overrun with students. 40%+ of MIT undergraduates are majoring in CS! Will likely make academic life less and less attractive of into the future. Best people will depart for greener pastures and a lot more money.