I agree. Setting up Cassandra is simple. It is later when you get to things like:
mutator.setColumnOrSuperColumn( ... )
mutationsMap = new HashMap<ByteBuffer, Map<String, List<Mutation>>>()..
compound column..
super compound family of super columns...
where it feels more of a senior project, rather than something simple as:
curl POST '{"red":2, "blue":4}' http://127.0.0.1:8091/riak/laundry/shirts
Although CQL fixes some of the problems with Cassandra complexity [Thrift does not even sound good in all 3 languages I know], I still believe it will be far more "desirable" (as the real http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cassandra was) if more forces are applied to simplicity and polish.
It annoys the hell out of me that I can't launch the app by default because it points at directories that aren't user-writeable. Riak just has the etc and var directories inside the tarball. Cassandra just assumes that it is able to write to /var/...
Also: Setting up the Schema changes quite a bit since 0.7 and that was always kinda annoying. Nothing that is really that big of a problem, but it feels like I have to change the code every minor version since 0.7. (note that they didn't set up a schema in the screencast and the cluster that got started is pretty useless, isn't it?)