Because often that's going too far. Quite often you still need transactions, established technologies, some structured-data, , etc, etc.. Sometimes a regular SQ

Because often that's going too far. Quite often you still need transactions, established technologies, some structured-data, , etc, etc.. Sometimes a regular SQL database, but with some de-normalised tweaks is all you need. There is definitely a place for NoSQL. However, many projects simply don't need to bite this off. They could start with SQL, from there you can decide how rigid/structured you want to be... I definitely agree that this comes with baggage; but if you're prepared to be pragmatic it's often got a lot of upside.