If you have a working implementation and have yielded moderate results, then you have earned "success". In this case I get the feeling you want to use a differ

If you have a working implementation and have yielded moderate results, then you have earned "success". In this case I get the feeling you want to use a different set of technologies to either improve performance or ease extensibility. How much did you screw up? 7/10. You have found that node.js and mongodb are not the most mature technologies and would likely find python + sql (mssql, sqlite, postgresql, whatever) ... nicer.