It's not bad, and Apache Spark adds SQL on top of some other nosql DBs, but they are still hard to use.
Cassandra for example: you can't just put a secondary index on a table to enable sorting on it. There are secondary indexes, but they aren't useful for that (they don't perform well on high cardinality data).
Want a different sort? Make a new table. And duplicate the data, since there are no JOINs.
I think you are spot on - I've done a lot of working from home, but it's by far the most satisfying when there's a chat room (or IRC) system setup. It makes it fun, I feel more connected, and I think we are more productive that way.
If this code base was in good shape to start with, this is probably just illustrating that there is a point of diminishing returns on refactoring.