I'd agree entirely. Unless you have an exceptional reason, in which case you probably know what you're doing already, build a version of your system which uses either a relational database (with a sensible schema, not a single-table EAV thing) or a filesystem as a backing store first.

(When it comes to a primary data store, its first job is integrity, so denormalization is premature optimization.)

Similarly; don't distribute any computation you don't have to distribute. Just getting a bigger machine is remarkably likely to be cheaper, more operable and more reliable.