[starfox]

This is why I stick with Rails; for the mindshare. There are many reasons to be critical of Rails, but the bottom line is that other people generously contribute work like this on a regular basis, making me instantly more valuable to employers or clients.

[tikhonj]

This is a good point, and it's one of the main reasons I prefer open source in general: this is true for almost all fairly active open source projects. However, I'm not sure how this differentiates Rails from some of the other popular web frameworks.

[lunaru]

Rails is now pretty old (in tech years) and one reason for active participation and contribution to the community is that the Rails team continues promote forward movement in the framework. So Rails is also always new.

A lot of the stuff people moan about (e.g. lack of backwards compatibility and constant breaking changes) is also what keeps it fresh. It's not hard to introduce new best practices because the old ones are continually tossed out. This can't be said for a lot of open source projects that value stability over change. (For some projects, stability is rightfully more important).