What? CouchDB gets a lot of hype. Naturally people are curious, and they try to use it to solve their problems. Sometimes these problems aren't the problems CouchDB is good for. You can't fault the "software hipsters"--- the CouchDB documentation does a terrible job of explaining the "Why" of CouchDB.
I don't know, I think it's pretty straightforward. If you're going to use a piece of software that's based around map/reduce, you should understand the how and why of map/reduce first. CouchDB is actually a pretty straightforward piece of software. The documentation is totally fine. If it seems sparse, it's because CouchDB is a pretty sparse piece of software! It actually has very few features compared to most database systems.
If you had actually read my criticism you'd see that I do get what it does. I'm not faulting the design, I like it a lot, it's just that the implementation has issues that caused me to favour other schema free backends.
