Yehuda Katz gave a great talk at Mountwest Ruby Conference 2009 called The Great Rails Refactor. Very informative speech about the things going on to move Rails in the right direction towards 3.0. Also, please make sure you listen to the last part about Competition. Yehuda really nails it, and definitely made me feel more at ease about the merge. PS Confreaks has to be one of my favorite things in the Ruby community. Those guys rock.