In reply to Ryan Hellyer.

I have nothing to do with Stream but I can say that there are most definitely benefits to what they have done that can directly impact the existing users in a positive way.

The product as a standalone plugin is extremely limited by what is possible in a standalone environment utilizing MySQL in what is on average going to be a bare bones shared hosting environment. Not exactly robust.

When dealing with a data intensive product such as Stream that is similar to work with web site analytics you are going to be handcuffed by the limitations that come with running such a data intensive plugin on a limited server environment that is completely out of your control.

By leveraging more advanced cloud technology for the data store they can do much more with the data and do so much quicker than they ever would be able to on your average shared hosting based WordPress site.

We run into similar issues with Gravity Forms. There are things that we would love to do that we simply can't do right now because of the fact we have no control over the hosting or database environment in which the code is executed. It's most definitely a limitation that can be overcome by leveraging cloud based services.