I personally don't missed Rails mostly because boilerplate doesn't really bother me. I'm more afraid of using the wrong abstraction. Rails (v4 was my last expe

I personally don't missed Rails mostly because boilerplate doesn't really bother me. I'm more afraid of using the wrong abstraction. Rails (v4 was my last experience) was hard for me and I think my reasoning is as follow: - I like to dig deep into the framework I work with but Rails have so much meta programming (a.k.a magic) that I struggle real hard figuring out stuff. You often have to go into runtime, hit method and see where it lead you to and after a while, I realise that I'm not going to see the bottom. - If you are someone who like to dig deep, the documentation wasn't helpful for me at all. - ActiveRecord for a while discourage using foreign key. When I move away from Rails, I tried SQLAlchemy and love that its unopinionated. Then I move to node and agree its ORM are less powerful but I learnt to love SQL. ActiveRecord for me shouldn't be any more than just convenience ORM and shouldn't replace SQL, that goes against Rails' ActiveRecord philosophy which claim these constraints should be at the model side rather than DB side. https://guides.rubyonrails.org/active_record_migrations.html#active-record-and-referential-integrity https://guides.rubyonrails.org/active_record_migrations.html... - Lastly, I firmly believe MVC is a leaky abstraction. Any variations of MVC is just shifting the complexity around, not reducing it. I worked on Rails, worked on iOS (which uses M-V-VC). The pattern I see is that almost every year, someone will get bitten by vanilla MVC, tried some variants unsuccessfully and conjure a new variant; the cycle goes on. MVC is a 20 year old pattern, it have amazing insight into how we should build application, but its implementation always fall short after so many years. Ultimately, I don't think Rails was optimised for someone like me. I think there's just fundamental differences in philosophy between me and Rails.