For me that was one of the turn-offs of CouchDB, that it had been around since 2005 and still was not considered to be production-ready as late as last year.
Despite being alpha (and now beta), CouchDB's been in production at a number of installations for years without issue.
Because the #1 goal is reliability, we've hesitated to recommend production use, until the most recent release (0.11). CouchDB 1.0 ships this summer, and is definitely a safe place to put your data.
