There's a number of parts of Rails core that could probably be spawned off to other gems. For example, the form building tools: there are several better ones ou

There's a number of parts of Rails core that could probably be spawned off to other gems. For example, the form building tools: there are several better ones out there - I know I always use Formtastic over what Rails provides. Another one would be the built-in testing DSL. RSpec and Minitest do that pretty well now, why is it a part of Rails? Then again, I hate these type of conversations: my bloat is someone else's timesaving feature. "Why does Rails have an ORM, they're too abstract!" some might complain... but engineers on a Rails app bigger than a few man-months may love the time the ORM saves. (Especially when the client changes their mind on how a business domain feature should work, for the third time in as many iterations).