Overall, you're right, but I'd point out that this is by design. In the past two years our top two goals (hopefully like any high-tech startup) were to build a

Overall, you're right, but I'd point out that this is by design. In the past two years our top two goals (hopefully like any high-tech startup) were to build a product that electrifies people and has a solid architecture. The reasoning was that if people don't want the product nothing else matters, and if people do want the product but the architecture doesn't allow rapid changes, we'll lose. Really good implementations of specific features was priority number three, and while we did a lot of that too, it sometimes took a backseat in light of the first two. That's ok though -- now that we have a rapidly growing user base and a solid technical architecture we can go back and replace placeholder implementations with better ones according to user demand. We're not entirely happy with all our choices, but no one ever is. I think that the overall direction worked out really really well for RethinkDB and its users. EDIT: gruseom and mrkurt beat me to it.