I'm not much of a CouchDB user (though I've played around with it a bit), but I would assume that at least part of the reason CouchDB's mailing list is so quiet

I'm not much of a CouchDB user (though I've played around with it a bit), but I would assume that at least part of the reason CouchDB's mailing list is so quiet is due to the rather public split of the community brought upon by the introduction of Couchbase. Couchbase's forums have much the same sort of "How do I" questions you are talking about seeing on the other project's mailing lists.