Where did you get that from? CouchDB is what I've seen most used and suggested by far.

How is having all second party modules be global automatically a convenience? That sounds like the worst possible way second party modules could work.

Throwing away a package manager as great and as tried and tested as NPM, which could easily be used seems so counter-intuitive.

well its called "smart" package manager so perhaps the team believes NPM is a "dumb" package manager? But isn't a package manager suppose to be dumb? Sounds like over-engineering already :P

I've taken a look at Derby, but I still can't piece together how you're supposed to do queries and the like. Like if I need a list of 25 items of a type or check if the current user has the right permission to edit something.

We plan to support reactive functions, more complex queries, and authorization, but such features are not implemented yet.

It's worth mentioning that clustering will also be built into Node.js 0.6.0 which is being released in the coming week according to the official blog.

Don't know if it's as extendable and pretty as TJ's cluster though.