[olddb]

>You might think this is trivial -- but SERIAL creates an "owned" (by a certain user) sequence behind the scenes, and so you run into massive headaches if you try to move things around.

Maybe it is because I'm too old, but making id grow by sequence is the way how things 'ought' to be done in the old skool db admin ways. Sequences are great, it allows the db to to maintain two or more sets of incremental ids, comes in very handy when you keeping track of certain invoices that needs to have a certain incremental numbers. By exposing that in the CREATE statement of the table brings transparency, instead of some magical blackbox IDENTITY. However, it is totally understandable from a developer's perspective that getting to know the sequences is just unneeded headache. ;-)