I think this is just a cultural thing where the ecosystem prefers to compose things together. The Node ecosystem also hasn't centralized around a Rails. People tend to just use Express.

Also, the syslog server example doesn't seem like something a Rails would solve.

> can we please just get together at the next Conj conference decide what our "Rails" is going to be?

I think these days we, OP included, tend to use "Rails" to not just mean a monolithic framework, but also one that monopolizes the ecosystem which is one thing that made Rails good.

But since it's been tried before in the Clojure and Node ecosystems, maybe people just don't care for it.