Ok I got way off topic. I don't understand why Amazon.com is so intuitive but Mechanical Turk and AWS are so "bizarre".

I work with a few ex-AWSers. Apparently work conditions are terrible and there's a lot of churn. That would explain why the design is so inconsistent.

Keep in mind that I was writing this as someone who mostly uses Riak these days. ;)

I think you will find that was OP's point.