Have you looked at Erica? It's an Erlang successor to couchapp (Python) with nicer features that help a lot in developing and deploying CouchApps.
The apparent lack of activity may also denote that these tools simply work. Couchapp is technically deprecated in favour of Erica, but it works well.
Also note, that there are many ways for designing CouchApps. Erica and couchapp both implement a "filesystem in the design doc" method where the design document holds attachments that are accessible as regular directories and files. In this case the key is the filename and the value the file's content.
Kanso, for example, processes an app.json
file with a description of your app's content. Think: Makefile for CouchApps.
These differences may also affect on your choice.