I agree. I commented earlier that the Node community seems to prefer small modules over Rails-like frameworks, but I think a solid web framework would be good for Node adoption by people who prefer them and beginners.
Trails is actually much more modular than Sails. The goal is the same -- to make your life easier -- and the conventions are rails-like (indeed, compatible wiyh Sails) but the technical design is completely different and actually quite a bit more "node-like".
Keep in mind that Trails is not a fork, but a Sails-compatible re-write. So there's no upstream code-level reconciliation that can happen, but I'm sure both projects can coexist and compete in the framework market on their merits.
The same could have been said of Rails and Merb back in the day, but they eventually combined efforts, and rolled the concepts that people liked from Merb back into Rails. It wasn't a case of just copying the code over, but it still allowed proving the ideas in the real world.
Please leave me and my team alone.
One note: we're using Hapi by default, but koa and express4 will be supported as well. This is part of our modularity difference.
[1] https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/the-treeline-company
Fortunately, Travis did not change the Crunchbase page for Treeline. However, he did deface the Crunchbase pages for Sails, Waterline, Balderdash, and me personally (I've since reverted them).
Sails.js development has basically stagnated in the past year, and many people in the community believe Balderdash, the company behind it, aren't giving it the attention it deserves (they have a few new projects they're working on). Travis Webb and his team behind Trails were kicked out of Balderdash (not clear if fired from the company or just removed from GitHub group), and Travis blames Mike from Balderdash for doing it as a political move to keep control. Mike has said very little publicly about it, apparently not wanting to stir up more drama.
Trails seems to be an attempt at achieving what Sails has achieved (a full-stack modern MVC framework in node) with newer tools (ES6, I think Koa by default instead of Express, etc) and perhaps more modularity.
I think it's an ambitious project with good goals, but it will be a while before it will be stable and ready to use. And if it does reach that point, it's still susceptible to what's hurting Sails right now (a larger community than your developers can handle, de-prioritization, politics...).
Hopefully this turns out like the node / io.js split and is, in the end, positive for the ecosystem in some way.