&gt; This &quot;let someone else do the work, get it from a gem&quot; mindset is what kills long lived projects<p>If you replace &quot;gem&quot; with &quot;library&quot;, this actually makes a lot of sense. It saves time to reuse existing (high quality) software.<p>Plenty of ecosystems do just fine with this mindset, starting with the JVM and .net.<p>The problem is specifically Ruby and the gems system.