> we fought the losing battle of educating the market.
I've been at ten startups. At least half of them chose that battle, and that would be the less successful half. Sales cycles are fragile things. Anything that slows them down can be fatal. Clearly you need to explain how your offering is unique and special, but if you have to pause to explain basic concepts before they get it then you've probably lost their attention and their business.
The VP of marketing at one of my previous companies was generally an idiot and one of the chief drivers of that company's failure, but he introduced me to the concept of market vs. technical risk. A product can be easy to market but a challenge to build, or it can be the other way around. You can build a strategy around either. If it's hard in both ways, you're in trouble. Frankly, it sounds a bit like that's the trap RethinkDB fell into. They were doing things that were technically hard and hard to explain to users. That's how you get three years behind.
It's a sorry situation, but kudos to the RethinkDB folks for trying to do the right thing, mostly succeeding from an engineering perspective, and writing honestly about how that played out in a market of people who aren't equipped to appreciate it.