1. That’s not exactly true, AFAIK all RDBMS return columns in table order when order is unspecified (`*`), and while they could reorder on retrieval

2. postgres definitely does not, and column tetris is absolutely a thing in the same way struct packing is (with the additional complexity of variable-size columns)

But the order of attributes in the presentation of the result relation has nothing to do with physical layout of base relvars -- primarily because any relationship between the two is purely coincidental. The vast majority of useful queries will not reuse the order of attributes in base relvars, so optimizing for the unusual trivial case by prohibiting better rearrangements that could be useful for a much larger number of use cases seems rather pointless.

And what PostgreSQL does is of course an implementation detail of PostgreSQL.

> the database should be able to reorder the data in whatever way it likes

My point was that you’re trying to prevent the DB from reordering the data because there’s a performance cost when that happens.

Why would you be trying to prevent the DB from reordering the data? You're not supposed to have better knowledge of what's good for your use case than an RDBMS that can collect usage statistics on queries and such. Ditto for compilers rearranging structures and such. When you start having hundreds of tables and thousands of queries, I don't see how you can do a better job than an automated system at that point.

> Why would you be trying to prevent the DB from reordering the data?

Sure. “Reduce the need” would be a better word than “prevent”.

If I can do a good job organizing the table columns (as described above) it’ll lower the need for the DB to reorder data.

Reduced need to reorder, improves performance.