I really enjoyed this review, it came off very honest and you didn't try to be very pro or con, just what you ran into over the past year.

You mention no reasonable Scala client exists, why not create and release your own? I know Riak talks about offering fulltext search, but one thing I've learned over the years is using a specifically designed search engine (such as lucene/solr/indextank) is typically far more performant/scalable plus easier to implement then a generic datastore. I've never used riak for search so I have a few questions. Did you ever attempt to use a different datastore for search? If you did, at first did riak perform just as well, if not why not?