[jacobsenscott]

Yes. I'm working on an actively developed rails product that is close to 10 years old. All the stuff that just followed the "rails way" is still super easy to work with to this day. All the "experiments" (you find these in any old code base as developers and fads come and go) in "decoupling from rails" or whatever are extremely fragile and difficult to work with.

[bombcar]

This applies to almost any programming language - things done "the standard way" will survive decently well (or have obvious migration paths) - things done "your own way" will be more fragile.

Of course, languages vary on how much they have a "standard way" of doing things.