Just got the same shocking message, I had the same feelings about orchestrate, I worked with orchestrate for a wile but I was skeptical as you (glad for that) so I switched to self hosted solution few months ago to a new data base "crate.io" it wasn't that hard to migrate code base, no data transfer though since I stopped using it before launching my project :)
Yes, I am kind of wishing I had followed my gut feel too. I had tried AWS's NoSQL system, but had interminable trouble getting it to integrate with BotKit - Then while researching things I saw that Orchestrate had a plugin which integrated easily, and we managed to get it working in an afternoon and were delighted.
Now it means we have to pull out all that code and integrate another NoSQL system in there for data storage. I am glad that we held off from launching our bot to the public this month - we were waiting until the new year. So fortunately I don't risk losing any real customer data - only beta tester data. Inconvenient, but not insurmountable.
It has made me a lot more reticent to consider other small players in our stack though - might stick with AWS all the way from now on.
I've been using duktape for some while now and it's totally amazing, for the wonder minds about why using duktape instead of V8 or SM here's some of my list
First of all duktape written in C not C++ I hope this is a good point for you as it was for me :)
Not everyone seeks speed, for me, simplicity and ease of use beats speed any given day, after all I'm not after complex computations and fib that loops for ever :) one file to include and pretty sure it well compile in many platforms to get a full working Ecmascript E5/E5.1 how awesome!
Compilation time, don't know about current SM compilation time but I tried once to compile V8 and I still feel sorry for doing that to my poor old machine :)
Memory management, I'm not sure how, but duktape's GC is amazing.
Last and the most appealing point for me "unfortunately no one mentioned that yet" is documentations, I don't mean just api, please visit duktape.org and see how beautiful well written everything there, Sami "the author" put a great effort not just to write duktape but it's documentation too, api, usage, comments, specifications, examples ... and best of all it was clear and very easy to follow.
The only thing I hope is more people join to help Sami maintain the project, currently the man is very active and responsive, but I think the project will expand in the next few weeks with more and more users, so I guess he will need some help then :)
again I'm glad I followed my hunch :)