1) Agreed. Fully. Of my outside work time messing around on projects and such, 50% is reading HN, 50% is experimenting with new Rails plugins, or Ruby gems, or databases. I find on average, I end up finding something I prefer every 1.5 years as well.
2) Disagree here. Sure, you can't forget about it, but Rails 2 is perfectly useable. I'm currently managing a fairly substantial mix of Rails 2 and Rails 3 apps for various clients. If 2.3 works fine for them, and they want a minor feature every few months, it's just not worth the cost to them to upgrade. Sure, if major security holes emerge, patch and upgrade.
3) Agreed. I have a big gap between "things I play with on personal projects", and "things I'd use when I'm being paid at work". When I'm writing things for a client, I want battle tested code that I can predict against. I want to be able to say "That will take me a week", so I can bill, without the risk of going overbudget. If I take a new and shiny framework, and as a result of bugs in their code, or lack of documentation/6 month old blog posts being totally redundant and wrong, I end up slipping on the deadlines, that's not a situation I want to be in.
The thing that I really like is that Rails 2.x worked. I've got github, which stores old versions of gems and plugins for me to grab. I love Rails 3, and I teach new developers on it all the time, as I think it's far easier to learn and far more intuitive than Rails 2, but with Rails, I can take advantage of a fast moving easy to write system on new projects, while not getting screwed over on the old ones.
2) Disagree here. Sure, you can't forget about it, but Rails 2 is perfectly useable. I'm currently managing a fairly substantial mix of Rails 2 and Rails 3 apps for various clients. If 2.3 works fine for them, and they want a minor feature every few months, it's just not worth the cost to them to upgrade. Sure, if major security holes emerge, patch and upgrade.
3) Agreed. I have a big gap between "things I play with on personal projects", and "things I'd use when I'm being paid at work". When I'm writing things for a client, I want battle tested code that I can predict against. I want to be able to say "That will take me a week", so I can bill, without the risk of going overbudget. If I take a new and shiny framework, and as a result of bugs in their code, or lack of documentation/6 month old blog posts being totally redundant and wrong, I end up slipping on the deadlines, that's not a situation I want to be in.
The thing that I really like is that Rails 2.x worked. I've got github, which stores old versions of gems and plugins for me to grab. I love Rails 3, and I teach new developers on it all the time, as I think it's far easier to learn and far more intuitive than Rails 2, but with Rails, I can take advantage of a fast moving easy to write system on new projects, while not getting screwed over on the old ones.