Very difficult to determine why Couchbase Server fails to start up

This has been an ongoing issue for many versions now but I hope we can make some meaningful progress in the near-term.

When there are low-level problems with Couchbase starting up it's very difficult to diagnose even when the root cause is something very simple.

The experience from the end user is:
-Installing the software says it works
-Starting the service says it works
-One or more beam.smp processes are even running
-Yet 8091 is not responding to any requests

Initial investigation usually shows the babysitter process running and ns_server continuously restarting, but there's no indication to the user:
-That there is a problem
-Which log to look for
-What log messages to look at

I know there can be many underlying causes, but it's the experience for the end-user that I'm hoping we can improve upon here.

For a specific example, I've uploaded this set of logs after trying to install and run one of our latest builds on a CentOS 6.5 system: http://s3.amazonaws.com/customers.couchbase.com/perry/output.zip