Version 0.10 of Waterline now supports associations. It's not as robust as I would like it but its iterative and it's getting better all the time. As for issues piling up thats something that is tough to solve. There are only a handful of us and we try our best to get to issues in a timely manner but like any large open source project it's a battle. Our builds are also passing now :) https://travis-ci.org/balderdashy/sails/builds