I had some experience wrangling Memcachedb (memcache + bdb for persistence) in the late 2000s, and came to much the same conclusion.

Redis was definitely more featureful, and antirez is both an engaging character and admirably humble, so I can see why redis overtook it in popularity - but, for me, memcached has always been the pinnacle of "choose boring technology".

As a platform engineer, I'm happy to support either - but when developers start using some of the more advanced redis features (persistence, replication, clustering), I try to make sure that they've fully understood the downsides of that decision.