Not arguing your points, just a wondering: Why stick to Rails then? Without ActiveRecord Rails is a pretty big bloat with a mediocre view layer. Routing is nice but I'm sure Sinatra could do that as well.
The majority of Ruby jobs is on Rails.
All I need, personally, is a server like Puma, a router like Roda and the pg gem really. Then of course it depends on the application you need to develop.
I would probably need some library to coerce string values to types (boolean, integer) for forms, and a mapping mechanism of some form to convert a pg result in a data shape I control.
I would probably need some library to coerce string values to types (boolean, integer) for forms, and a mapping mechanism of some form to convert a pg result in a data shape I control.