> Spring is neat, was it just a port of Zeus into Rails?

Conceptually, they're the same thing, but since Zeus is written in Go, it's totally different code.

> These settings should NOT be stored at the file level, it should be handled by environment flags. I feel this is a fundamentally broken feature.

I personally use environment variables to handle this case, but basically, every single approach has pros and cons, not to mention that there's legacy codebases... small steps.