The "versioning" is really just there to support their optimistic concurrency model, if I recall. The idea is that you know you need to retry your operation if the version hash of the file has gone up since you last read the data and thus you know your local file is out of date.

As I recall, the id field is just a string. It's just common to let it do the automatic "#-hash" representation.

It's been a while since I played with CouchDB though, so I could be off.