Oh Unicorn... a little GC tuning goes a long way, and isn't that hard... For most apps the time spent in GC, while annoying, is far and away not the bottleneck.

... especially since Ruby 2.0 as the GC is much, much faster.

I'll be honest, I don't think the memory bloat is that problematic if you design the app well (business logic definitely prevents this some time)... but in general you can pass most of that off to a background worker, or pre-cache responses so you aren't bloating your app server instances/threads.