How long has it been since you've used Turbolinks? I've been using the Turbolinks 5 beta with not a lot of issues. Of course, I used this from the get go with a new application.

and spring which causes all types of weird random bugs from old cached code in development

You should try it again. It's gotten quite good at automatic reloading. I use it with Rspec and as long as you've got spring-commands-rspec[0] installed, it's never a hassle.

[0] https://github.com/jonleighton/spring-commands-rspec

Agreed. I've been using spring for about 1.5 years now and it has saved me huge amounts of time. The only time it hasn't picked up changes was on initializers and the router, which is understandable. I can't imagine developing without spring. I would be restarting rails hundreds of times per day.

Same here. AFAIAC, the default Rails setup has been leaning more and more toward a Basecamp-specific kind of use case, rather than the generalized tool it started out to be.

Turbolinks messes A LOT with conventional design. Unless you really want the "one page" approach, or have a small, simple app or site -- or even if you just want to design a site using normal CSS conventions -- then Turbolinks gets disabled right away.

Fortunately, we can still do that. I can legitimately question the decisions made regarding default settings, but at least those settings can be changed.

Wasn't Rails originally a Basecamp-specific tool because they quite literally built it as Basecamp?

Do you mean Rails gems or 3rd party gems?