Before I dive knee deep into this, does anyone have any opinion on sharedb or better alternatives? (it was listed in this post under it's old name, sharejs, as one of the more successful OT implementations out there so that's a good sign)
We wrote ShareDB at Lever[1], which was in the 2012 YC batch (iirc). We wrote it to allow realtime collaborative editing in our application of all our data fields by default. I'm still really proud of that work. ShareDB primarily uses JSON-OT[2], which lets you do realtime OT over arbitrary application data. The lever team has been maintaining & improving sharedb for the last few years, which is really lovely to see as I've moved on to other projects.
One nice thing about OT is that its much easier to implement. The original quilljs author (Jason Chen) wrote the rich text OT implementation. ShareDB works with any OT code (so long as operations can be JSON stringified / parsed). And its all hooked up in quill, which is super neat. And looking at the quill github[3], it looks like David Greenspan has been maintaining quill recently. David Greenspan is one of the original authors of Etherpad, which is one of the first web based text OT engines.