Yes, my arguments may be technical in nature, however the arguments in the article are worse than straw-man arguments. I'm surprised the author didn't mention that MySQL doesn't cost $20,000 per processor, therefor must be bad. Even given the intended audience (who, as you suggested, may not be extraordinarily technical) the pro-MySQL author did a much better job laying reasonable arguments.

You mention Excel jokingly, but I know some companies which maintain large databases worth of information inside of Excel (statistics on hundreds of applications for hundreds of devices on dozens of networks, reported daily ) because no one wants to write a script to input data into a database.