The trend is moving toward putting the view logic into the clients as championed by the many Javascript MVC frameworks such as Backbone.js, Ember.js etc. When y

The trend is moving toward putting the view logic into the clients as championed by the many Javascript MVC frameworks such as Backbone.js, Ember.js etc. When you use these to build your web interface, what is needed on the server is just JSON API. From this point of usage, Rails is "bloated" as you do not generate views on the server and push down to the clients. There is also another aspect of the web that might caused that view. That is the rising usage of websocket type of real time app, which Rails is not able to handle directly yet. This makes full-stack framework like Rails looks less agile thus bloated when you compare to Node.js for example.