I think this might be a mischaracterisation. Rails merged with Merb because they were accepting of new ideas, and didn't see the point of 2 groups wasting thei

I think this might be a mischaracterisation. Rails merged with Merb because they were accepting of new ideas, and didn't see the point of 2 groups wasting their time implementing the same kinds of stuff. Rails is an opinionated framework in that it has strong opinions for what the default configuration should be. They realise it can't be general purpose and stay as effective. But if you're doing CRUD apps, on the web, those defaults save you a bunch of time. That's not hostile to differing ideas, it's just saying that some ideas don't belong in rails or rails itself becomes less good.