That's part of the problem in a way. Rails-style large applications are kinda poor by-design. Even Express suffers from this more than I'd like (express-specific plugins etc). Ideally Express "plugins" or extensions would just be thin wrappers around things that the rest of the Node community can utilize. I'm guilty of this too of course but that's largely due to time constraints.

Anyway, writing Rails for Node won't be anything revolutionary, it would just be... Rails on a different platform. Frankly lots of developers including myself prefer these smaller frameworks, sure some things might be a bit slower to get started with but ultimately you're not fighting a framework, it's just another block of lego.

I used Drupal for about 3 or 4 years, and you can get things going much faster than Rails even, but you'll spend a lot of time fighting the thing.

I hope so, but with the caveat that it's easy to start a project like this and a lot harder to see it through. Various Node projects have shown promise, but haven't gone the distance. If one really gains traction, that's great for Node overall.