1) I swear only to convey emotion. I feel it helps my message, but I realize that other people do not feel that way. I respect your opinion. 2) The team working on it is too closed. They need dedicated people to clean up the "mess" left behind, to act as a kind of a Gatekeeper between core and community. 3) If you're in the Rails community it should be you who is scratching "the itch". Contribute 15 minutes of time a week to doing something beneficial to the community. Personally, I've taken to keeping a list of all the people I've helped and I'm going to put them on my wall as sort of an "achievement tracker" in the form of sticky notes. These are the people who's development lives I have added to, and this is one way I can silently thank them for using Rails. 4) Rails community is still "exploding" and I think with the release and associated press (read: circlejerking) there will be a lot more newcomers to Rails.

To your final, unnumbered point: I disagree. There are still quite a few large sites that are using Rails and if "the world" had moved on, wouldn't have these sites also? I will not deny there being decent competition with Rails. There definitely is "solutions" that do it as well or (and this is something you won't hear a Ruby guy saying often, so please enjoy it whilst it lasts) better than Rails. Django, for instance, I hear is getting more popular and some people are jumping ship from Rails to it. Rails will, for the (slightly biased) foreseeable future, will still be a "big player" in the web-application world.