[JohnBooty]

I feel you on the treadmill pain!

  (The fact that some of the things Rails adds seem
  unfortunate to me (turbolinks, spring), can add to my
  frustration too).

For those reading this, just wanted to add that the Rails team puts a lot of effort into making things fairly modular. For example, disabling "turbolinks" is as easy as removing one single line from your .gemfile (the config file in which your gems are listed)

[cheshire137]

And remove `//= require turbolinks` from your application.js. And remove `"data-turbolinks-track" => true` from your stylesheet_link_tags and javascript_include_tags.

[amccloud]

Or rails new hello-world --skip-javascript

[jrochkind1]

But maybe you don't want to skip all javascript.

But rails devs heard our pain, and next version of Rails will let you skip turbolinks specifically too (not sure exactly which version it's slated for, and now I can't find the Github issue where I learned about it).

The modularity is nice... although the tradeoff is, ironically, code complexity to support that modularity.

Regardless, every new feature is additional code complexity in Rails, additional dependencies that may break with that feature and need to be upgraded (or that may require that features since it's now default, even though you need to turn it off), and treadmill time upgrading your apps or engines to work with the feature _or_ to disable it.