&gt; <i></i>Winning this war has as much to do with culture and marketing as algorithms and data structures.<i></i><p>This is true enough. I&#x27;d go farther and say that winning depends <i>almost entirely</i> on culture and marketing. The annals of computing are littered with the forgotten remains of technically amazing projects that suffered from poor or non-existent marketing execution. Rails is so popular mainly due to marketing tactics that won developer mindshare, rather than due to any technical merit.<p>The larger question is not a mutually exclusive either-or situation. A good framework should be easy to use for the most common cases initially <i>and</i> well thought out enough that it&#x27;s easily extensible in the future.<p>When Rails first came out, I loved it. It made common stuff easy! Sure, it became intractable if you needed to deviate in any way from the planned normal cases, but that was fine for now. I thought it was a great V1 of the Ultimate Web Framework, and in time they&#x27;d build it out to have better and more flexible extensibility. I thought it was fine starting point to build upon, and that eventually they&#x27;d redo and flesh out the various badly designed subsystems.<p>As the years went by, I realized that it was not a V1 of that mythical Ultimate Web Framework. Not at all.<p>Its developers were quite content to feed on the low end of the market that just needed a quick way to shuttle data between a database and web forms. They had no intentions of updating its design to accomodate any other use cases. The few concessions that were made to other use cases were generally bolt-on hacks rather than integrated elements of the framework. They were focusing their time on flying around the world giving talks at conferences, writing books, giving training seminars, and otherwise monetizing their brand.<p>Actual <i>engineering</i> work on Rails itself slowed to a near-halt, and it was then usually reactive in the sense that Rails had to be dragged forward kicking and screaming. Rails was no longer an innovator, but that was fine because they were making plenty of cash off of what Rails was. Indeed, they now had a strong disincentive to make any radical design changes, since they would have to redo all of their books and course curricula around the new design.<p>There is no reason in principle why one <i>couldn&#x27;t</i> build a framework that&#x27;s both easy to get started with and easy to extend. It&#x27;s just that nobody&#x27;s bothered to do it yet.