That's right! I always feel the (childish, I guess) need to make the distinction, because I still feel a little uneasy with that ambiguity. In Spanish, people from the USA are called "estadounidenses" (which obviously comes from the "United States", not from "of America"), so there is no confusion; plus, a lot of Latin American (i.e., Spanish speaking) people complain if we conflate the two meanings of "American", so there is a little cultural pressure. I've talked with some American friends of mine, and it seems that there is a cultural difference that makes us think of the USA as if the name of the country is just "United States", and "of America" is just referenced officialy, just like Spain is always called España and not "Reino de España", which is the full official name of the country. In fact, in Spain we call the USA just "EE.UU.", that is, Estados Unidos. Funnily, there is also a difference on how we distinguish the continents (North America and South America vs. just America).

Well, you probably already knew most of that, but I wanted to justify myself...

I strongly agree with this, and because of that I've been severely chastised by quite a few kool-aid drinkers. On my current job we have a NoSQL database (a MongoDB one, actually) and we indeed have had to reinvent some SQL here and there, including a few manual joins. The job would just have been far smoother (and faster to develop), and surely more performant, if we used a well-established SQL database, but someone decided that it wasn't buzzwordy enough.

On the other hand, if everyone is already getting all the benefits available, is there room for improvement?

You know, when we Europeans read this kind of comments we're not sure if thery're serious or not, and I'm positive that most people from the right think about the same. No wonder Poe's law exists.

I honestly believe, as smug as I might seem, that the average European is a lot more knowledgeable about politics than the average American (American as in someone from the USA, not from the American continent). This is caused by the extremely bipartisan American political system; most European systems allow for a far greater range of political formations to enter office, by lowering the barriers required to get some degree of control (in the USA you need to get the majority in a full state, and then you get all the seats; European countries usually rely on d'Hont's system for a proportional distribution of the power inside each region). This doesn't mean we cannot have de facto bipartisan systems in Europe (we've suffered it for a lot of years in Spain, although it seems to be receding a little; and even so, we always had a minimum of about 7 or 8 different parties with small representativeness in the congress), but they're usually more fragile, which may incentivize parties to invest a little more effort into preventing their voters to flee to another party, i.e., not hearing exclusively to lobbies. All this means that we're usually exposed to a lot more different ideas and reasonings.