First, I'm going to quibble with #5. The networks databases typically must communicate over are typically much lower latency and are at the very least far less subject to spontaneous hardware failure (human error is another matter that I'll concede is certainly debatable as that has a lot to do with the complexity of your storage and network systems...).

I really wish this were true man! For many shops it is, but under load, even local networks will break down in strange ways. All it takes is dropping the right syn packet and your connect latency can shoot up to 3 seconds. It's also common to have a database system with 0.1+ light-second distances between nodes, which places a pretty firm lower bound on synchronization time.

I'm totally with you in this part. "State" is the magic from whence most (all?) software bugs seem to stem.

Absolutely agree; databases are simply the most complicated state monads we use. I actually count filesystems as databases: they're largely opaque key-value stores. Node-networked filesystems like coda, nfs, afs, polyserve, whatever that microsoft FS was... those are exactly databases, just optimized for a different use case and with better access to the kernel. SANS are a little less tricky, at least in terms of synchronization, but subject to similar constraints.

While on one hand I completely agree that one needs to select the system which best fits your data and application, the maturity of more established solutions ensures they've been shaped by a far more robust set of different contexts. They've crossed off their list far more "fixing corner case X is now our top priority" moments than those who have come since. They really can better address a much broader range of the needs of at least applications that have been developed to date. By comparison most "NoSQL" stores have advantages in a fairly narrow set of contexts.

You're totally right; traditional RDBMSs have benefited from exhaustive research and practical refinement. Strangely, most other old database technologies have languished. Object and graph stores seem to have been left behind, except for a few companies with specific requirements (linkedin, twitter, google, FB, amazon, etc). AP systems in general are also poorly understood, even in theory: the ongoing research into CRDTs being a prime example.

So to some extent the relatively new codebase of, say, Riak contributes to its horrible failures (endless handoff stalls, ring corruption, node crashes, etc). Those will improve with time; I've watched Basho address dozens of issues in Riak and it's improved tremendously over the past three years. The fundamental dynamo+vclock model is well understood; no major logical concerns there.

Now... the AP space seems pretty wide open; I would not at all be surprised to see, say, distributed eventually-consistent CRDT-based, partial-schema relational, kv, or graph DBs arise in the next ten years. Lots of exciting research going on. :)

Why don't we worry as much about choosing a filesystem to suit our app as we do a database?

If I had to guess, it's because non-esoteric local filesystems offer pretty straightforward capabilities; no relational algebra, no eventual consistency, etc. If you have access to ZFS it's a no-brainer. If you don't, there are decent heuristics for selecting ext4 vs XFS vs JFS et al, and the options to configure them (along with kernel tweaks). The failure modes for filesystems are also simpler.

That said, I agree that more people should select their FS carefully. :)