[torben-friis]

>'vanilla rails' is really a bunch of other tech bundled together.

That was roughly my point - unless there's something wrong in my mental model, a Rails user is someone who trusts Rails to get them a sane and consistent bundled pack of tools so they can skip the choice and get to work. If one is going to choose a different set of tooling later on, that seems to defeat the point of using Rails in the first place.

I was not judging the framework itself, for the record. Just saying that if you go for it, going "vanilla" seems like the only sensible choice.

>when they upgrade major versions, all of the tooling that comes bundled in the box changes.

this does sound like a major con indeed.