It really is a new religious war. MySQL itself should be avoided I think in favour of MariaDB. MariaDB is a fork created by the original developers of MySQL. Since Oracle took over MySQL they have left a ton of bugs unfixed, removed the automated tests, and all sorts. The MariaDB guys fix all the bugs.
Also you should avoid the MyISAM engine and only use XtraDB or InnoDB. MyISAM is little more than a glorifed version of grep.
Personally though I switched to Postgresql several years ago and have never looked back. It works a treat for me. Combined with pgbouncer as well which gives a huge performance boost.