I don't think so. This boils down to a set of already installed, pre-configured gems in a starter project. That's always how Rails has worked. When I was consulting, I had exactly this for myself before Bullet Train ever existed - a pre-configured rails repo that I just forked when I started something new.

The thing w/ Bullet Train is that so much work is done for you, that if you don't like an opinion or two that they hold, you really should start from scratch, as tearing things out will just take longer. Its the downside of having so much integration and configuration already done.