Well, they did end up making it a pretty good database. They saved the good parts (great clients, dev experience) and got rid of the bad (original storage engine, instability) add and have a legit database. Good on them.
Yep. #2 is kind of a hush-hush way of them fixing a bug that can take a lock on a collection during a chunk merge and fail to release it, resulting in writes to primaries to stop until they are kill -9'd.
