I totally agree with this. This situation where a library has a de facto monopoly on monkey patching is just weird an unfair. It reminds me a bit of MS's good

I totally agree with this. This situation where a library has a de facto monopoly on monkey patching is just weird an unfair. It reminds me a bit of MS's good old EEE strategy. People get comfortable with ActiveSupport to a degree where they start disliking to not have it's small benefits. But the consequence of this behaviour, that most are oblivious to, is that it to a large degree puts Rails in control of the language. ActiveSupport feels like a leftover from the old days of prototype and jQuery. You search for a solution and half the answers on SO will assume that you are using it (and many of the answer authors don't even know it) I'm sure it's not going to happen, but I think Rails should stop using ActiveSupport internally. It would allow devs to decide for themselves if they want to pollute the standard library, and also open the door for competition. While the syntactic sugar of "1.day.ago" is hard to match, I don't think an alternative have to be that bad "ActiveTime.days_ago(1)"