I passed zero judgment on CouchDB, but was responding specifically to the notion that doing something "wrong" if it saves you a small amount of development time at the outset is fine. When these are foundational things like your data tier, such an attitude is a primary ingredient in project failure.

Nah, dude, you're saying that it's ok for one-off projects, but you'd be crazy to use it in production because it's gonna blow up on your eventually. That's not true at all. Plus, ya'll arguing about conjectures with that catastrophic failure stuff.