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....