When I bought a 3-D printer years ago, I had an important insight. I was either buying a printer as a project, or I was buying a printer to help with other projects.
Both are reasonable answers. It makes people happy to work on their 3-D printers. They love tinkering with them, like printing new braces, holders, parts, etc. The love tuning them. They love finding the perfect filament storage system. That's the hobby. The 3-D printer itself.
I was buying a 3-D printer to make parts. When I realized that I didn't want another hobby, a whole bunch of printer options fell off the table. I wound up choosing a printer that would pretty much work acceptably, once assembled. I have printed stuff with the printer, but I guessed right. At no time do I ever look at the printer as anything more than a tool to get something else done.
From my perspective, it feels like a lot of the JavaScript community falls into the former category. Their JavaScript environment is beautifully incomplete. It must be perfected. They tinker with the works to get the perfect packaging and build process. Bits and parts are changed out, re-worked, or re-written. I think the fact the language invites edge-cases also gives plenty of fodder for new ideas.
I'm a tool user, and that's what I liked about straight-up rails. It did a good job, was faster to develop on than enterprise Java, and the end-product was understandable. Rails and Ruby weren't my projects. The application I was working on was my project.
Yep, 100%, that's a great example. I have a friend who LOVES tinkering with his 3-D printer. He built a CoreXY from scratch to his own spec, he hacks about in the firmware, he experiments with new slicing algorithms, but to my knowledge he's never actually printed a 3D part for any purpose except calibration and for making 3D printers. The printer is the hobby. Its ability to make stuff is both entirely the point and also entirely unimportant.
But the idea of a 3D printer is totally different. It's for people who need to learn just enough about 3D printers in order to use them to do other things. The idealized owner of a printer does not care how printers work besides picking one that's suitable for a job. If you spend a lot of time thinking about the design of your printer, something's wrong. A framework should, for most regular work, be as much like a printer as possible.