I would not call it "unpular" in the sense that it does have a strong base of community and most people, that once "got it" really loved it. I know people that

I would not call it "unpular" in the sense that it does have a strong base of community and most people, that once "got it" really loved it. I know people that tell me how they miss being able to work with it and keep using it privately even after switching jobs etc. Unpopular in the sense of "not popular"/too few people know about it or consider it currently is true. For one, couchdb does not have a major VC backed owner with a huge marketing budget, this is also good aspects, eg. as a true apache project no single company can just take over or do major changes against the community motivated by their investment structure. From a technical perspective the admin interface "fauxton" never really felt finished and debugging views is not welcoming for new users. Also creating good and working indexes is critical but is still too hard for novices even with mango syntax, especially as devs are now used to things like query autocompletion and friendly error messages/ warnings while typing or simple guis. The managed hosting story is also not compelling as forced ibm cloud was a big step back for many non corporate users after the cloudant acquisition and other players seem too small/niche to consider. Apart from traditional marketing, couchdb does not create a lot of news, as it is just REST, you don't need client apis or very integrated frontend libraries, the features scope is quite settled. I have email alerts for hot fixes and apart of that i check the progress once a year and apart from that things just work.