Exactly my thoughts. For example, I know for certain that José Valim is (or at least was last time I checked) a core ruby dev and he's against this change for example. DHH wants to sound like he's talking to trolls and the casual Rails user, but it's clear from the github thread that he's responding to seasoned members of the community as well, which quite frankly is a pretty shitty way to treat people who are known contributors. It's not a community, it's whoever screams loudest. To me that thread and this posts shows that DHH is willingly wearing horse blinders instead of keeping his opinions being open to being amended through thoughtful discussion with others as talented as he is.

The biggest problem with this "omakase" attitude is that it's causing Rails developers to miss the boat on many new developments in the state of the art in web app development because legacy is now baked in via opinion. 37Signals hasn't been the forefront of web-app design for a few years now. There are plenty of single page web apps out there that are far more responsible and present a better user experience than tools from 37Signals. Don't get me wrong, they are still decent, but they aren't demonstrative of what is achievable insofar as excellent user experiences are concerned.

Maybe this has changed, but I spent a year working on a single page webapp built on Rails and the asset pipeline was excruciatingly painful to debug to get your javascript and other assets handled properly.