The Go community has a very similar story, where someone released a web framework, with an unorthodox set of features, and was flamed to the point where he abandoned the project and quit OSS.
Martini used the service injection pattern and made use of reflection to do so. It was a very popular framework and one of the first in Go (it currently has ~10k stars), and the use of reflection became a very contentious viewpoint in the community.