My experience is that full-stack frameworks like rails (and hopefully redwood) free you from a ton of bike-shedding and customization up front and help you get

My experience is that full-stack frameworks like rails (and hopefully redwood) free you from a ton of bike-shedding and customization up front and help you get to a point where you outgrow parts of the framework. An advantage of using something like rails today (or over the past 5 years) is that there was a huge crop of unicorn rails startups that all hit those challenges before and a lot of their solutions are codified in open source tools that can be plugged into the framework. In some cases those startups (like shopify, github) have made huge investments in ruby and rails themselves. I hope in a few years that will be the case for redwood. I like the concept of innovation budgets for startups. You can only innovate on so many vectors because time is typically your most limited resource. Very few startups have a good reason to spend any of that budget on innovations that are not core to their product differentiation. These things include web frameworks, corporate structure, credit card processing, low-level hosting. Just pick a pretty standard solution that fits your use-case and move on. I don't think it's a coincidence that so many of the big startups over that past 10 years were built with big batteries-included frameworks (would be so curious about a larger study of this, I just have cloudy anecdotes). Don't get me wrong, I love bleeding edge web stuff and playing with new frameworks. But if my priority is making a new company succeed I'm going to look for a framework that minimizes time spent picking libraries and gluing them together nicely and maximizes time I have to iterate on the product and tweak user-facing business logic.