[tony_landis]

Good points. Replication is certainly not painless to setup, and I've had trouble with continuous mode simply failing. I'm sure those warts will be worked out though.

Lucene and Elastic Search go a long way, it is just one more service to configure and maintain. Thats been an annoyance for me. If Lucene could be built right into couchdb that would be a major improvement.

However, that still doesn't let me cherry pick the values I want from a document. When the app is in a dynamic language, the cost of deserialization can add up.

Building some kind of xpath expressions to pull out specific parts of the doc would free up developers from spending as much time writing views, and would likely be much more performant to have that operation take place server-side. Maybe that should be an Elastic Search feature though and not Couch.