Big tools are great for products (e.g. ElasticSearch, Kafka), not so much for OSS

When releasing an oss project please be mindful of your users' budget. Building everything on top of CouchDB was a deliberate choice

I could have gone for Postgres + Elastic + Rabbit, but I didn't

Accessibility is not only important for UX, but for DX as well. Imagine wanting to install an oss app and realizing it needs a db, elastic, kafka, redis and keycloak. That's heavy on both devs and ops

When building a service please DO USE the best tool for the job.

When building an OSS project please try to be nimble and small. The best projects are the one that can be run on a RasPi

Also consider flexibility. My vision for the project was to be able to go from a super small, single node deployment to a massive multi-DC HA setup.

You can't easily or cheaply do that with Postgres or Elastic.
Want to run them on a Pi? I would love to see you try