I'm going to address my opinions on your issues a few at a time.
As to the existing libraries, I find a bigger issue is sometimes the number of bad libraries that have become more popular than maybe better libraries. That and some bits have been abandoned for some time now. -- That said, I find that since most of them are out in the open, it's easy enough to fork and address the issues at hand, if the upstream author is unresponsive, then change the name in package.json, and publish your own version.
I've seen far worse error handling... you can use try/catch/finally, which is pretty standard, and most internals will do this for you, and return the error against the callback.
npmjs.org isn't the entirety of the node community, and I think this particular instance was a bit of a mistake, but perhaps not having npm fallback to regular CAs was also a mistake... if they'd done that, it would have continued to work. I don't know of a way they could have done this without breaking something... The lack of advance notice is the biggest issue, but many/most wouldn't have seen it anyways.
With node/npm it's easy enough to create more/smaller packages/modules that are easier for larger teams to maintain. We've been using git+ssh:// references for our internal packages.
I've spent the better part of 4 years following, and over 3 using node.js. I find that there is a huge mix of developers in the larger community, and that it's a lot like running with scissors at the moment, but things will stabilize when the dust settles a bit. I think it's uptake has been far faster than Ruby/Rails and there have been some growing pains.
More than the front end developers, we get to have full stack in one language for a lot of environments. We also have the benefit of a few very large companies participating (Yahoo, Walmart, and others). I'm at GoDaddy in Platform and Commerce development, and a huge portion of our new development server-side is going with node.js
I don't doubt that there will be detractors regarding the use of node.js in certain environments. I wouldn't use it for say image processing... but I might use it as a manager against a queue which launches image processing. It's a matter of using the right tool for the job.