Thanks for your comment; regarding your thought, from my perspective there was nothing that Parse provided that was easier than just building the app on Heroku ourselves. And we wouldn't have been stuck in the horrible node/javascript ecosystem then!

So, I would say, if Parse had been this Parse Server product from the start, that would have been a lot better! But there wasn't really any need for such a thing at my company. We had to use Parse for incestuous "YC alum" reasons---we did not have a technical need for it.