I never nail it the first time around. The fact that they have explored the problem three times and revised their solution in pre 1.0 piece of software actually

I never nail it the first time around. The fact that they have explored the problem three times and revised their solution in pre 1.0 piece of software actually comforts me. pre 1.0 is a great time to make big revisions like this. It may have been close to good enough the first time, but the third iteration will undoubtedly be better. From @aphyr's blog it seems that other projects have issues with clustering, so the fact that influx's clustering design is unique isn't necessarily a detracting factor. It isn't not re-inventing the wheel if there is no tried and true solution they could be using.