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That's a lot of poor speculation. If you explore Merb and its community more, you will see that the elitism is pretty much non-existent. Merb is extremely new, so of course it does not have as many developers as more mature frameworks. When Rails came out of the gates, you could have said the exact same thing.

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The big difference here is that when Rails came out it solved a real problem. Every other popular web technology at the time was much, much harder to use and slower to develop in. Since then it's acquired some inevitable complexity but most of that was in response to somebody's need for a feature. Merb will accumulate the same complexity if it's successful.

To me this just sounds like Common Lisp vs Scheme all over again.

Merb will accumulate the same complexity if it's successful.

Not likely. Merb will accumulate plugins. Rails had most of its complexity, or at least signs of it, from the beginning.

I wasn't implying anything about Merb community, just pointing out that switching to a new development platform can bring surprises from quite unexpected angles.

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