I do understand the need to refactor and clean up code, however, there is a lot to say for at least deprecating things for a very long time as I find the current RoR far too volatile like you say. Unless you are doing prototypes, short lived sites OR have a fulltime team on it all the time (who upgrades to every small increment of every lib and fixes/refactors/tests the entire project), I don't like it so much. I have done and supported RoR projects and it really takes out the initial wins when you sit swearing behind your monitor because even trivial libs (for which, in fact, you already had to resist the urge not to roll your own) stop working after installing the latest and the greatest. Sure, then don't upgrade to the latest; for a lot of things that's not an option (security would be one, needing another feature this new gem has is another) and it should just give you a nudge 'this is deprecated, please fix' warning for the next year+ instead. If you didn't fix it by then, then at least you were warned plenty in advance.