[ingenthr]

It's not so much that you need to use the memcached API. We've built a set of client libraries that give you a consistent API (check out couchbase.com/develop) though parts are done through memcached binary protocol (for speed) and parts are done through a RESTful interface inspired by CouchDB.

It wasn't about resource constraints; it that we felt going after distributed deployments and having the speed to keep up with application demands (mostly driven by CRUD) was important. That's what devs and ops people kept telling us they'd need.