Don't knock it if you haven't tried it (Score 1)

Parse is hugely useful as a way to "assume" a back end. Any good NoSQL database does most of the association work during the write task; in this case on mobile client. With a few housekeeping tasks running on the parse server you can actually make a clean, fast, scalable service but obviously it's also great for prototyping. I think Facebook dropped Parse because they are not one of the big four making $$ in the cloud and Parse is a SaaS; it runs great on Google cloud.