Who passed away amongst Monero core devs? You had a dev older than me?
warptangent was a talented coder and active Monero developer but not "core team" member and certainly not a forum personality (I think he may have posted once or twice). I'm pretty sure he was younger than you. Out of respect for his family's privacy I would rather not go into further details about his death (and I also don't know that much)
Announcement was here:
https://www.reddit.com/r/Monero/comments/4c9wh8/a_fond_goodbye_to_our_friend_and_contributor/He and I shared the affliction of illness, but apparently his was sudden decline and mine chronic.
I don't use a DB in my coin design, as that is horrible for performance.
That is reasonable but if if you are going to use a DB, LMDB is about as lightweight as it comes because it uses memory mapping and access to hot data is as fast as regular memory. Of course, much rests on knowing how to use it properly, and although the Monero implementation is getting better, that part is unfortunately still not optimal.
I suppose I should also count Howard Chu, the developer of LMDB, as a premier level Monero coder. I didn't think of him because he is relative newcomer and I also haven't personally reviewed his code (other than a few small commits, but I couldn't get much from that). But his accomplishments with LMDB, LDAP and other projects speak for themselves. He prefers to code in C, not C++.