Nostalgia warning: I also grew frustrated with Rails / ActiveRecord and jumped to Merb / DataMapper with excitement. Perhaps it will sound like a small thing, but I remember feeling especially frustrated that every ActiveRecord model became such via inheritance. This drove me crazy:

    class User < ActiveRecord::Base

Why should my `User` extend from `ActiveRecord::Base`? Is a User of my app also an ActiveRecord::Base? What is an ActiveRecord::Base anyway?

So, when DataMapper came along and favored composition over inheritance I was sold.

However, my experience with DataMapper was that it didn't have the stability of ActiveRecord, nor did it reach feature parity.

And, then Rails killed Merb. At the time I thought it was a tragedy. The competition Merb provided did improve Rails, it would have been nice if that competition had been longer term, though. On the flipside, I wonder if there would have been enough community to support two large Ruby web frameworks.

In the end I made peace with Rails and ActiveRecord (and, believe it or not, even ActiveSupport!). I don't have great love for Rails, but it is a powerful tool, so I accept it for what it is.

That said, I think the author's criticisms are well stated and hopefully there will be some influence on the future direction of Rails, etc, and the way devs approach Rails.