The Rails core team does seem to treat the project as if it's a personal playground. But the improvements they make do seem to (usually) be good ones. Since it's almost always the case that you can eschew their choices, the complaints I hear are not compelling.
I think you're missing the perspective of someone who has a major body of apps to maintain. I easily upgraded a trivial app. Now I'm slogging through a month long Rails upgrade process on a very large app. Unless you've been stuck with a large upgrade like this, it is probably hard to understand the upgrade pain.
That said, I love the changes in Rails 3. Considering strings unsafe and escaping them by default is great, bundler rocks, arel is very nice, and the mailer api is nice.
The rapid change and code purity ideals in the Rails world leads to benefits, so I tolerate it in Rails in spite of its costs.
This idealism has unfortunately infected projects in the Rails ecosystem that are really just infrastructure (where change should occur slowly). As examples, both Rspec and RubyGems are willing to break compatibility and code that I rely on for benefits that are neglible, aesthetic, or invisible to me. The difference is, when Rails breaks something, 90% of the time it buys me something.
The Rails core team does seem to treat the project as if it's a personal playground
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And thats a dangerous attitude to have, because as smart as they are (and they are very smart guys, make no mistake), they can also make bad decisions, just like the rest of us ... the difference being that the impact on all of us could be huge.
The author says Rails is growing up, part of growing up is learning to be responsible too.
