Tim O'Brien makes a case for Rails having drifted far from the original vision of simplicity, ease of starting, and speed of development... into a hell of frameworks on top of platforms on top of hosting "solutions".

I worry sometimes that JS is going in this direction too...

RAILS drifted away from simplicity, but RUBY did not.

JavaScript FRAMEWORKS might drift from simplicity, but JAVASCRIPT will not.

Is it a truism now that all languages eventually reach Java-level insanity?

Yes. At least they haven't reached COBOL-level insanity. :)

And on what planet was Javascript ever simple?!? lol 

No language that's expressive is simple. But it's among the simpler languages:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_programming_languages

Damn there are a lot of programming languages.

Reading his post, it seemed to mostly boil down to "there's this framework called Refinery which is poorly written and brittle". Having lived in the Ruby/Rails world for 6+ years, my perception is quite different: things seem pretty well componentized, in fact even trending towards unbundling (e.g. using ActiveRecord outside of Rails, or a different ORM altogether).

So basically, avoid frameworks on top of frameworks?

This is best illustrated by the movie Inception, where each new dream is slower than the one it is built upon...

I think even frameworks on top of frameworks can be OK. It is how well-componentized they are. For example, the UNIX world evolved the notion of these little programs which had a single purpose ("do one thing well") that you could then string together. The Ruby/Rails world has the same potential, and a lot of the Gems out there adhere to this model. But there are a bunch which don't, and it sounds like Refinery might be one (never having used it, mind you).

UNIX tools were great because they were fast.

I think where some frameworks-on-frameworks go amiss is in the performance...