In some ways that might be an advantage. More people are going through the growing pains associated with tens of millions of people using their site and request-per-second and data size problems, and making trade-offs for that providing service at that scale.

Jumping to Facebook's current architecture and taking on the trade-offs taken there (assuming you even have a problem where those trade-offs make sense at massive scale) is probably not the right thing to do when you are much smaller (in terms of requests/traffic/load, servers, and employees).

I'd love to see a 2013 update on some of these numbers.