He's not complaining about bloat. Unlike many other high-level languages, Ruby has several viable execution environments (MRI 1.8, MRI 1.9, Rubinius, and JRuby) and Rails works on all of them. OS X ships with a system Ruby. The result seems to be that some people have trouble getting the right combination of runtime and libraries running.

And that's my point, Rails has a lot of functionality that it provides through a lot of dependencies.

Exactly the opposite of the self-contained mini-framework (if not micro-) it started as.

I don't think it's fair to characterize Rails' early accusations against Java webdev as "The frameworks are too large." They accused Java frameworks of requiring too much ceremony, repetition and verbosity, but I can't think of many instances where early Rails advocates attacked Java for having too many features.

Your first sentence has nothing to do with my point, and your second sentence has a false premise; Rails was never a mini-framework.

Is rails technically a microframework? It feels absolutely massive compared to, say, Flask or web.py

I believe that's the point ovi was trying to make.