Believe me, dear reader, when I suggest that thinking in a distributed fashion is awkward. When I had first encountered Riak, I was not prepared for some of its more preternatural concepts. Our brains just aren't hardwired to think in a distributed, asynchronous manner. Richard Dawkins coined the term Middle World---the serial, rote land humans encounter every day, which exists between the extremes of the very small strangeness of quarks and the vastness of outer space.
We don't consider these extremes clearly because we don't encounter them on a daily basis, just like distributed computations and storage. So we create models and tools to bring the physical act of scattered parallel resources in line to our more ordinary synchronous terms. While Riak takes great pains to simplify the hard parts, it does not pretend that they don't exist. Just like you can never hope to program at an expert level without any knowledge of memory or CPU management, so too can you never safely develop a highly available cluster without a firm grasp of a few underlying concepts.