Propose ideas, try finding solutions (software solutions) to improve production e reduce production time, study new languages and coding languages and frameworks during your spare time and try to understand if they can be used in your corporate, smile and dress well. ;)

a positive one here: http://rob.conery.io/2015/04/17/rethinkdb-2-0-is-amazing/ never used personally though... but it now has my curiosity.

Sure, fortunately a json export is not big deal... You only have to be sure that changing APIs (or connections) in your app won't cost much time. If it isn't so, maybe it's better use a stabler DB from the beginning (mongo)

I've just read about Parse... and the migration tool they're giving to pass your data to a MongoDB database... :) ... since I'm really enjoying working with Firebase (especially with Polymer) I really hope for a different future for it!