Yeh the 3 founders essentially being pulled off the project to a competitor definitely took its toll.

However one founder has returned full time to the project, and while I would still describe it as 'in recovery' its definitely looking promising, there have been more contributors than ever this year, theres exciting work in progress in the works including this bigcouch merge and fauxton, as ell as couch related project like hood.ie and (forgive the self promotion) pouchdb.com

So its looking up, this email definitely sums up the current enthusiam for me - http://mail-archives.apache.org/mod_mbox/couchdb-dev/201307....

The community is about pi/2 ahead of the external perception. We're a year away from losing the founder and the brand confusion with membase (unfortunate). That said, the committer base has nearly doubled in the last year and the project is really starting to move. I think the closer you get to the project the more excited you'll find people. I think the next few years will be very good for CouchDB.

touchdb/couchbase-lite is pretty active. I use that to replicate data from a CouchDB cluster to Android and iOS devices, for a game.