If you want stagnant frameworks there's plenty to pick.
There's a difference between stagnant and growing in the right direction. I think the author believes that RoR is moving away from what many thought was one of its core pillars: The ability to go from nothing to an up and running web app quickly.
Lots of things aren't stagnant -- few things move in the right direction. I'm not saying that RoR isn't moving in the right direction, but I think you've created a strawman of sorts.
I dunno, I kinda got from the OP that is was more about moving too fast than moving in the wrong direction. But, OP aside, I get what you are saying.
IMO, as long as Rails is being driven by real application development, I'm happy. Compared to "enterprise" frameworks which are built in isolation from the real world, Rails movement seems more grounded in pragmatism.
I have no opinion on this, but the original article makes a few cases for this: no more ajax/javascript helpers in core, no more catch all route by default etc.
The catch all route is there, you just have to uncomment it. It takes one second.
There are other points where the article is plain wrong to. "It used to be that you just used Prototype, now it goes to vast efforts to be agnostic." No, it switched the default to JQuery, thank god.
I just wanted to add my two cents because I'm actually just learning Rails right now. I had never messed with Ruby or Rails at all until two months ago and I've actually enjoyed how easy it is to build basic applications with Rails quite quickly.
I came from PHP and did a lot of work with CakePHP and some with Zend Framework. I found CakePHP fun to work with but often limiting. I found ZF unpleasant to work with and often just as limiting because the effort involved in doing certain simple tasks was often too much.
With Rails I was able to crank out some basic functionality quite quickly and the only hang up I've come across is learning how to create plugins. Then again, the plugins I need are often out there in the world and I could probably get away with never having to write one.
I still think Rails is incredibly easy to learn the basics of but it also is well developed and thought out leaving plenty of room for more advanced behavior without running into the same walls I feel I ran into with PHP development.
Since I started with Rails 3, I don't have any perspective on how difficult it is to keep up with the changes but I must say I'm excited about 3.1 and I don't mind having to dig into whatever information I can scrounge up to familiarize myself with it.
There's a difference between stagnant and growing in the right direction. I think the author believes that RoR is moving away from what many thought was one of its core pillars: The ability to go from nothing to an up and running web app quickly.
Lots of things aren't stagnant -- few things move in the right direction. I'm not saying that RoR isn't moving in the right direction, but I think you've created a strawman of sorts.