Performance testing is a fickle art and publicizing misleading or non-generalizable results can be extremely damaging to a small business like this, even if the results are not representative nor applicable to most people.
For a relatively novel data model with potentially unusual performance characteristics, the chance of finding a properly done, fair, and generally understandable benchmark is virtually impossible.
A damaged reputation is hard to repair, if even possible.
As a small business, the choice seems to be pretty straightforward--pay multiple salaries to do PR, damage control, reputation management, etc. (and compete with huge corporations with deep pockets)...or pay those same salaries to engineers to build a better product for your customers, and get your customers to promise not to create PR headaches for you.
Tech is a ruthless meritocracy, because people face challenges constantly that exceed their capabilities.
If something sucks, they will shout it to the skies. If it performs better or saves their ass on a key feature, they will shout it to the skies.
Let those shouts echo, and the equilibrium is how we decide on what's next.
Censorship is almost always a bad idea. Furthermore, you shouldn't chill the ability of people to talk about a platform if you eat your own dogfood and believe in it.
That seems like a very negative way to approach benchmarks. It could also be a PR boon--out of nowhere, the company could get positive attention for someone else doing work on the company's behalf. Assuming the technology is performance competitive. (But I don't know if it is or isn't--I've not seen any benchmarks).
A bad benchmark is something everyone can understand and use as criteria to disqualify a technology.
A license that prohibits a public benchmark is something only a few people care about.
Having seen hordes of developers on IRC, Reddit, and HN develop outdated gut reactions that they still invoke years after the fact has led me to believe that benchmark prohibition is easily worth it.
This is absurd. All databases, at some point in time, run into scaling and performance issues. Documentation by blogging and performance metrics are the only guiding light of sanity we have when these hard problems hit your app.