[willholley]

The chattiness is mostly addressed with _bulk_get in CouchDB 2.0 - Pouch will automatically use it if the server supports it. Another option is to stick a HTTP/2 proxy in front of your CouchDB instance - the chatter to the db is ultimately still there but it significantly reduces the latency cost to the PouchDB client. There are plans to add first class HTTP/2 support to Couch but for remote client architectures just adding a proxy should be a significant improvement. Projects like https://github.com/cloudant-labs/envoy take this a step further and provide an extensible proxy (e.g. you can do sub-database access control, etc).