If you grew up in it, it may not have seemed crazy. I played with rails 1, ignored 2, came in to a project with 3 RC1. loads of stuff breaking, but "they never do more than 3 RCs - we'll be fine before launch". I think we launched with RC5 (deadline was immovable). Felt to me like half the gems we needed were broken with Rails 3, and the answer was "just go fork it, fix some of these things, and use that". Felt fragile as hell, but the rest of the team acted like this just "how you roll" with Rails. I didn't expect that in something with a v3 on it, but perhaps because it was a major version bump it was more accepted?