NoSQL has technical merits, but it seems to me like a good chunk of the interest in it is driven by distaste for SQL and the complexity of RDB systems in genera

NoSQL has technical merits, but it seems to me like a good chunk of the interest in it is driven by distaste for SQL and the complexity of RDB systems in general. There are a lot of programmers out there who shudder at the thought of delving below the ORM, much less writing a stored procedure. Big companies may be many things, but one thing they are not is afraid of RDBMs. Enterprises are filled with the kind of people who dedicate their lives to learning every in and out of Oracle or DB2. Not to mention that these are the people traditional RDBMs products are designed for. They just don't have the same pain points as startups.