When Sync Gateway came along things got complicated (to me). Mostly because of another component to deploy, monitor etc. Did you consider bundling Sync Gateway into a Couchbase server, even if only for dev/staging environments?
We built Sync Gateway because the Apache CouchDB access control model wasn't fine grained enough for most apps, so it adds a data routing function to control sync access. (See link downthread).
Thanks for the feedback about simplicity. Our next release makes the Sync Gateway default config a lot more beginner friendly and even today we ship with a dev mode that uses a tiny embedded database instead of a Couchbase Server cluster for storage.