Very true. And as I mention in the article, ES7 async/await should help fix that: http://pouchdb.com/2015/03/05/taming-the-async-beast-with-es...
Anyway, the big benefit of async/await, to me, is that you really DON'T have to understand promises. :) For instance, at some point we will probably add ES7 examples to the PouchDB API docs (e.g. here: http://pouchdb.com/api.html#create_document), and you can imagine that, from the user's perspective, the word "await" will just be part of the API (e.g. `var doc = await db.get('id')`), and beyond that, they won't have to learn anything about promises or async or callbacks or any of that.