There's some other areas where Riak is significantly ahead, such as already having Map-Reduce (allowing the map and reduce functions to be in javascript, even),

There's some other areas where Riak is significantly ahead, such as already having Map-Reduce (allowing the map and reduce functions to be in javascript, even), scaling up and down are both already implemented, and riak supports multiple backends, including in-memory databases, leveldb, bitcask and innostore. In a matter of days, Riak will also be getting secondary indexes, full text search fully integrated, and riak-pipe, a great way of building workflows. If these people want to be working in Ruby, there's Ripple-- a ruby library supporting Riak, and adding Ruby style functionality (I believe, I'm not too familiar with Ripple.) I think if you want to go your own way and build your own thing, that's fine, and good for you, if its' a learning exercise. But if you want to advance the state of the art, either do something different from the rest, or join an existing open source project that is further down the pike and help it go even further. I say that, of course, while myself I'm working on something I've been thinking of as "ruby on rails done right" (namely, a web platform where you write coffeescript for the server, and you have scalability and database built in via close integration with riak)... but I hope that I'm cutting some new ground. (namely, letting you make coffeescript run concurrently...)