> If something with Drupal's advantages were available within Rails (as an engine or what have you) it would be a clear game-over for other stacks vs. Rails.
I have to disagree here. There are clear use cases for either Drupal or Rails. I understand why you yearn for a Ruby Drupal, because dealing with PHP is a hassle, but objectively there is little to be gained since Drupal is already a beast and performance would only be hurt by being ported to Ruby.
Aside from that, the key advantage that Rails or other low-level web frameworks have over Drupal is that they don't make any assumptions beyond the fact that you are using HTTP. With Drupal there is an incredible amount of pre-existing architectural cruft to enable its powerful functionality, but it creates a ton of overhead to deal with as soon as you want to do something that doesn't neatly fit it's paradigm. As soon as you brought something like this into Rails then you'd be defeating the purpose of its simple elegance.
I just don't see any way to separate out the best of both worlds. They have very distinct use cases.
To be clear, I don't want it in Rails core. I want someone to make a framework that can run in Rails where I can pull in giant duplo-blocks of functionality.
I have to disagree here. There are clear use cases for either Drupal or Rails. I understand why you yearn for a Ruby Drupal, because dealing with PHP is a hassle, but objectively there is little to be gained since Drupal is already a beast and performance would only be hurt by being ported to Ruby.
Aside from that, the key advantage that Rails or other low-level web frameworks have over Drupal is that they don't make any assumptions beyond the fact that you are using HTTP. With Drupal there is an incredible amount of pre-existing architectural cruft to enable its powerful functionality, but it creates a ton of overhead to deal with as soon as you want to do something that doesn't neatly fit it's paradigm. As soon as you brought something like this into Rails then you'd be defeating the purpose of its simple elegance.
I just don't see any way to separate out the best of both worlds. They have very distinct use cases.