My counterpoint is that Cloudant test and harden the CouchDB that we embed, it's not, for various reasons, a verbatim copy of CouchDB itself.

That said, vanilla CouchDB is quite stable. While there are always bugs, I don't recognize the system that the original poster is describing.

What kind of data do you record (number of documents, average size of document) ? We have to use couchdb at my current job, and I have encoutered all those issues for even moderate size (replication failing more often than @ ~30-40 Gb). I wonder if that's an environment issue.