Yes, it means Rails will feel more like Merb. From the article: "As you have probably gathered from the above, there aren’t any clear points that the Merb and

Yes, it means Rails will feel more like Merb. From the article: "As you have probably gathered from the above, there aren’t any clear points that the Merb and Rails team disagree on anymore." Basically, Rails is being reworked to be more modular, to have less tight coupling among components, to have a defined API and test suite, to support other ORMs, etc. These are the reasons Merb came to be, and the merge back into Rails vindicates the Merb team's design decisions.