[jacobsenscott]

I agree you need to be careful to only add high quality gems - but that holds true for the deps for any project.

You can also fork/vendor the gem and fix it, vs rewriting the whole thing from scratch. If a gem is abandoned you don't need to nuke it - you just take ownership of the code. Essentially if you use a gem you are saying "this code is as good as our code" so just maintain it just like it is your code.