If you're like me and moved off from Ruby to Rust as your go-to-everything, try Loco which tries to be a faithful Rails on Rust (loco.rs). It has the magical scaffold, the smooth experience, and the features you'd expect from Rails including authentication built in (like Devise).
We definitely try our best to match the Rails experience. Being that the experience is not something you can just have as a side effect.
We build stuff into Loco that Rails has, try it out, then decide if it's "Railsy" enough in the experience. If it's not, we delete it and try again.
I'm a Rails superfan personally, however as life turned out to me, I like Rust much more than I like Ruby. So the decision was to go "loco" and implement Rails for Rust.
We're looking for more feedback and people to try out Loco, please feel free to do so :-)
Great description of the problem. I enjoyed reading it, it’s almost like prose, great writing.
The solution I’m afraid is only one: solve smaller problems. There is no way a single person can solve a team’s problem as a side project. A small problem does not mean small codebase. It means small as in: focused, simple pain, simple solution, low amount of open questions.
Yes there is value to all of the other strategies mentioned. But if you want the root cause and the solution for this hydra effect it is the one I mentioned.
If you were born anywhere in the 80s, you might have spent the 90s and early 00s building side projects that you actually finished and felt no remorse over. That’s because scope was naturally small, problems were more focused, and there were multiple order of magnitude less options to choose from (in any domain: programming languages, libraries, interfaces, user flows, business workflows — everything was less)