I have a third interpretation: I think Solnic was complaining about a lack of diversity in the Ruby ecosystem. The most salient part of the post was (imo) the paragraph regarding how Merb was subsumed into Rails, instead of continuing to compete against Rails. Rails is essentially a monopoly.

> It seems incredibly odd to leave Rails over this. For what, Java? Unbelievable.

If projects such as Merb were more common, maybe Solnic could leave Rails without abandoning Ruby.