The big difference here is that when Rails came out it solved a real problem. Every other popular web technology at the time was much, much harder to use and sl

The big difference here is that when Rails came out it solved a real problem. Every other popular web technology at the time was much, much harder to use and slower to develop in. Since then it's acquired some inevitable complexity but most of that was in response to somebody's need for a feature. Merb will accumulate the same complexity if it's successful. To me this just sounds like Common Lisp vs Scheme all over again.