All software has its fair share of gotchas. Been stunned by all sorts of things over the years and had to work around it.
Have been involved in a large cluster deployment of CouchDB before. It works. One of my main issues when looking at it was the whole membase / couchbase / couchdb uncertainty at the time. That part alone is a big mess. As a developer, the toolset / documentation / API wasn't as mature, well-documented and didn't fit in as well. There certainly isn't as many 3rd party articles etc about it either. You can defend it saying it uses JSON, it's standard etc, but I didn't feel the support for its usage was there.
