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It means it's everything but the kitchen sink: heavyweight, difficult to learn and use, and full of features you don't need.

It has nothing to do with popularity being bad. In general that's good a thing, because support is better (and rails does have terrific support), but it does exert a feature-accretion force.

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I didn’t mean it as a slur! When I wrote .NET, the applications I was working in were massively large and complex, and so mostly what I was working on was optimizing small bits and pieces, and they allowed me to focus ON optimizing those small bits and pieces, because they were what mattered in that context. Rails let’s me focus on the big picture, because that’s what matters in my current context. Express had me working on stuff that I didn’t REALLY care about/want to know about in the context I was in.

Have you ever used rails? It's not heavy or difficult to learn. Many commonly used things are actually separate gems, not included in the core framework.

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