Yeah, I can't quite square what the OP is saying with how to deal with something like Amazon Dynamo's lack of large scale transactions. (Even basic ACID was only introduced late last year, if I read correctly.)
If you choose Dynamo, then you get to blame Dynamo for not having ACID when you lose data!
This is an incredibly common fallacy in our industry. Remember, you are responsible for the appropriateness of the dependencies you choose. If you build your fancy product on a bad foundation, and the foundation crumbles, your product collapses with it and it's unprofessional to say "Well, I didn't pour the foundation, so I can't be blamed." Maybe not, but you decided to build on top of it.
