The concern I have is that RethinkDB announced their death and vanished for 9+ months leaving everyone in a lurch, before resurfacing. The way they abandoned their users was deplorable so why trust them again? If you are into S&M just buy Oracle licenses...
I'm not entirely sure what you're referring to, but the closest I can think of is the move from the memcached interface in 1.1 to the ReQL interface in 1.2. If that's what you mean, I don't think it's fair to say we abandoned our users at all.
The memcached interface had very few people using it (literally single digits). We tried really hard to make it work, but there just wasn't any demand, so we decided to add a full query language, clustering, and rebuild with the realtime architecture. We supported the binary for a while, and helped most of the users migrate from the memcached interface to ReQL (which was fairly easy).
We also helped people migrate to other memcached alternatives if they chose to not to use ReQL. In almost all cases people could quite literally pick another compatible product without changing any of their code.
We took our time, helped people migrate (either to the newer version of RethinkDB, or to other products), and integrated the original architecture and as much of the code as we could into the new and improved RethinkDB. All of this was completely free of charge.
So respectfully, I really don't think you're being fair to us. I'm sorry if this inconvenienced your company, but given the dire circumstances at the time we really did the best we could (and arguably, much, much more than most companies do in those circumstances).
