Why use Oracle?

I once had been extremely fascinated by Oracle RDBMS and was quite a good DBA at that time (in the sense I could properly set up and run an instance while being able to quickly solve most of the issues). If I'm not mistaken it was about 15 years ago. The Oracle version available then was 7.3.3, maybe 7.3.4 and the instance I had to administer was intended for use in GIS/CAM application. I was really excited and amazed on how neat, descriptive, and useful the shipped documentation was. It took me a couple of week to swallow the Concepts volume and I never regretted doing so as the knowledge aggregated in just this single book is invaluable. I also remember we even bought just released Spatial Data Option to process map data in a faster way and, again, the documentation really rocked.
A funny thing is I even remember Oracle for DOS (I think it was version 5.x or close to that and it was scott/tiger even then!!!) shipped in a form of a box of 5.25" diskettes as part of Intergraph solution for a typical workplace we had in the company.

All had been well until I first encountered Oracle 8.1.x as a developer of a Java application server in 2000-2001. Most of the time that experience was simply annoying. We could never rely on JDBC to be stable and compatible and had to apply some workarounds to make things work. Switching to 9.x drivers to work with 8.x we once decided as the last resort solved a single problem but introduced a few more so we rolled back. I think it was about blobs that could not be read using standard JDBC calls. Even such simple issues were taking hours or days to resolve introducing delays and diverting developers from focusing on quality of business logic.

Why I recollected all of that now? Simple - after 6+ years working with Sybase and SQL Server I found out Oracle 10.x problems to be extremely irritating when you care about work efficiency. It seems that the time had stopped and although functionally of the engine got much richer since the last century, the pain of making things work became even worse, i.e. overall quality degraded. Maybe it is natural for such a complex product to experience all of those problems, I cannot tell for sure. However, at the moment I feel really sorry that in my current project it is not MS SQL Server with which I have never had any such trouble as it just worked all the time.
Just a small example of why MS SQL gets more points. MS SQL Server Management Studio Express, though being a free tool, is really cool in what it allows you to do compared to Oracle SQL Developer - the same-purpose free tool from Oracle, and that means doing everyday job far more efficiently. That's what resource planning is all about, isn't it?

And the question is why - why choose Oracle if there are far more attractive products in the market? Protecting investments while harming by that the efficiency of new systems development and as the result the quality of those systems? That sucks...
P.S. Just found this thread where a guy is looking for Oracle 5.1c for DOS. I wasn't quite sure that this version had ever existed and thought I made a mistake in the post but yes, I was right!