The key difference being that the Rails and Merb teams were full of great engineers, and that Merb was mostly meant to solve some specific Rails pain points. Native english speakers on the Merb team also probably could avoid using "actually" three times in two sentences. The Trails project seems like a lot of flash and "saying the right things" with personal enmity. for now there's no reason to expect it to be a better project than SailsJS in any way.

The trailpack abstraction ... amateur hour, or cynically, focus on branding.

Don't use these projects that are just designed to run consulting shops, seriously! I mean come on, they're actually flying aorund the country to user groups to market the thing ... lol.