Let's all hop on the next hip web trend, guys! Rails has become so boring and mature. There are many languages better than Javascript for server-side programs, but monoculture is so much cooler. One size fits all and you'll like it.
This is what Java guys said about Rails. "Hipness" is absolutely unrelated to whether something is actually good or not. I firmly believe that Meteor is a super fast way to build a certain kind of web app that just so happens to be very popular in businesses: CRUD apps where users can see other user's changes to data in real time. I will admit that older users are actually creeped out by other people seeing them type though. I guess its a generational thing.
I'm not going to sing the praises of Rails. I think it is a pretty good framework, but it is one hell of a hype machine. As software gets older and more stable, people get bored and reinvent the wheel again, especially web developers that will stop at nothing until everything is written in Javascript.
Rails was a fad. Meteor is a fad. Keep your nose out of hype.
Fads are good. Being able to run everywhere is also good, but frameworks eventually need to give way to new ideas. Not everyone wants to program in COBOL on .NET forever.
I missed out the first time around because the Rails community was full of fanboys and nothing turns me off a community more than zealot-like behaviour.
Then evaluate things on their merits and ignore the fanboys. There are plenty of people in this world looking for silver bullets, that someone excitedly claims to have found one is no reason to believe them.
They were right when they said that about rails though. Rails was a fad. It was not good. It codifies industry worst practices into a framework that can most charitably be described as "writing PHP in ruby".
