[jonpress]

A lot of wisdom there. I had similar experiences with SocketCluster.

It used to be a full-stack framework (with a heavy, opinionated client-side part) but I was the only one working on it and when Meteor, SailsJS etc came along, I understood it didn't stand a chance so I pulled out the realtime and clustering features and used them to focus on just the realtime part and it picked up!

What I noticed is that the more opinionated (and more complete) your framework is, the harder it is to build a community around it.

Developers like to use custom combinations of small, SPECIALIZED tools that only handle a SMALL part of the big problem.

... Unless you're a HOT startup with crazy funding... In this case, developers will trust your product by default. Developer trust is hard to gain - If you're small, you have to play for the long term and keep reinventing and rewriting parts of your project over and over as technologies change.