Giles Bowkett: Rails Went Off The Rails: Why I’m Rebuilding Archaeopteryx In CoffeeScript:

Going back to the larger issue, Rails definitely went off the rails. Cleaner, more modular APIs are an important goal, but they’re way less important than speedy development, a modern feature set — why is Rails not staying up to date with HTML5 the way it did with Ajax? — and, above all else, programmer happiness. The Merb integration rewrite was a giant, time-wasting threadjack with only a few small payoffs, and DHH, who wrote two whole books about why you should turn down feature requests, should have nixed the whole thing. I’m still going to keep using Rails, because it’s still a terrific framework, and I still enjoy it a great deal, but I think it’s absolutely fair to say that Rails 3 is a step backwards from Rails 2, and that Bundler, although very useful, is clearly not even close to finished. They say they’re at version 1.0, but I don’t think they’re fooling anybody.