I quite like Postgres and use it preferentially, but your numbers are off. SQL Server Enterprise costs more like $7500/core; that $15K pack, as far as I am aware, comes with two core licenses. SQL Server Standard 2016 costs $931 for a license if you use CALs ($209 a pop), or $3700/core.

Also bear in mind that almost nobody pays list price for any of this.

Day job. Never had to pay for it out of my own pocket! I've worked at MS shops for quite some time.

Also while we can do what we like with our newer SaaS offerings, getting some of our on-prem clients to use PG over SQL Server would be an uphill struggle so not considering other options isn't entirely our decision.

That $15K sounds like an Enterprise Edition costing too, IIRC Standard is significantly cheaper. Most don't need Enterprise, especially since 2016Sp1 when a lot of previously Enterprise-only features became available in all editions (including the free Express edition in many cases). Developer edition is currently free (licensed for development use only, of course) and is essentially Enterprise edition with different licensing terms.

It's about $7000 per core for enterprise - and if you do something like license a whole blade and put VMs on top of it, you could fairly easily run 10-20+ SQL VMs on one decent sized blade for < 150k. And anything pre-prod is free. It's a small cost for most larger size companies of this scale. If you have one or two servers, then no, enterprise is probably out of reach.

I use MS-SQL for my day job, and Postgres for personal projects. Pros of MS-SQL are mainly 1) easy integration with the universe of Microsoft dev tools, frameworks, and infrastructure, and 2) great database tooling in itself:

* SSMS - SQL Server Management Studio

* The MS BI stack: SSRS (reporting), SSAS (analysis), SSIS (integration)

Analysis Services, Integration Services, Clustered Index