Gems has been significantly improved in the last year-two years both under the hood and in the frontend (not to mention since it first came about…I refused to u

Gems has been significantly improved in the last year-two years both under the hood and in the frontend (not to mention since it first came about…I refused to use it until 2007). RAA has been obsolete since RubyForge (which was subsequently succeeded by Gems and Github), I am not sure why you would even bring it up. The MRI development process is very conservative, yes, but that is offset by the very dynamic development processes of Rubinius and JRuby (even if in part driven by the conservativeness). There are few things in the language itself that need change, and those are to be resolved for 2.0. The main development cost is in actually setting forth the changes, not in implementing them. The Stdlib sucks, sure, even if some of the libraries are better-maintained than others. Better alternates can be installed via Gems in almost all cases. There is an ongoing proposal to gemify the rest of the Stdlib (some parts are needed just to support Gems itself) mainly to reduce the distribution size and there are some arguments back and forth. By and large, however, it is pretty irrelevant to day-to-day life with Ruby. In the meanwhile, if you are serious about the problem: spend your own resources to adopt one of the stdlibs and update it as necessary. This is open source, and that is how problems get solved. Edit: removed tautology in 4th paragraph.