So again, in this article, I was not trying to convince people to give up on what they use, but instead offering an alternative for people who are looking for something else.
As Matz said: "We have several post-Rails frameworks, which is very good, and I believe in diversity."
- Matt
It doesn't help that today, adding more RAM costs very little, and that the new VM in Ruby 1.9 runs my Rails apps 3x to 5x faster, so I have very little reason to look outside Rails.
1. The default full stack will be a lot less thoroughly documented, tested and debugged because a lot fewer people are using it.
2. The chances that I can just jump in and start hacking productively on somebody else's Merb app are slim because it's likely I'm not familiar with some of the components you're using.
I still don't understand at all why I'd want to use Merb. What problem are you trying to solve here? Being slightly better than Rails in a few respects isn't even close to good enough to compensate for the lack of documentation, code maturity, available programming expertise, public success stories etc that Rails has going for it.
Perhaps because the pieces are sort of like Legos; they're designed to be mixed and matched with known results.
I prefer Ramaze, because it's more like Play-doh to Merb's Legos (sort of; I realize that's an over-generalization), but Merb is not some random collection of libraries. It is (I think) more like Rails with deliberate decoupling of components.