Another thing that I associate with this year is the spreading awareness of ORM and framework agnosticism. With the popularity of Sinatra and MongoDB, along with other Rack frameworks and non-AR DB libraries, there seems to be a big shift toward web-related libraries that are Rack-centric rather than Rails-centric.

Regarding Padrino: when it was released earlier this year I initially didn't think much of it, but after playing with it recently I believe it definitely has the potential to be another great Ruby web framework. It's already very usable and extremely pleasant to work with.