You are absolutely right. FYI, the rationale for this decision is that people are rapidly adopting Rethink and writing applications on top of it, so we decided to allocate most development resources to nailing down ReQL as quickly as possible so people won't have to rewrite their apps. Some operations issues (like #97) unfortunately had to temporarily take a backseat. I suspect we'll be able to resolve #97 in the 1.8 release.
RethinkDB will be marked production ready when it hits 2.0, though it will be ready for useful work way before that. (A huge number of people are already using it in their daily work and building important software on top of Rethink)
I've generally found the Rethink guys very level-headed and customer-focused. I made a feature request a year or so ago for a feature that was pretty outside the scope of a DBMS (custom memory/CPU limits for map/reduce operations) and they implemented it in a day or so, even though I was just asking if it's possible in theory.
They even sent me a small care package with a hand-written note, it was great of them. Marc, the guy who sent me the package, is now one of my regular DOTA2 teammates, and he's great at that too.
Major props to them, I really hope Rethink becomes as amazing as I think it will. I'll give it another spin over the weekend and write it up.
The most inconspicuous sign of RethinkDB taking over the world is what they named this release: Nights of Cabiria. It shows they have the strength to laugh at themselves, at how hard it is to build something like this, and how people have treated them so far.
These are interesting parallels and I suppose much of this might be true subconsciously, but it wasn't premeditated. For each release we just have a random person on our team pick a classic movie. @mglukhovsky picked this one; I don't think he thought it through that far, though :)
RethinkDB will be marked production ready when it hits 2.0, though it will be ready for useful work way before that. (A huge number of people are already using it in their daily work and building important software on top of Rethink)