I think it's being embraced more freely now because it's been achieved without losing the deep integration and sensible defaults that caused them to fall in love with Rails in the first place. I'm personally thrilled to be getting the best of both worlds.
> "Flexibility is over-rated. You're trading flexibility for productivity. Stop chasing it so religiously. Correspondingly, constraints are liberating. It encourages consistency. You don't have to worry about naming things and mapping classes." - DHH
This was in 2005. Right when Rails was starting. His point is that when you're starting a project, you can't make it uber-flexible if you want to get it done. Just write the thing, make it useful, flexibility can come later.
You can see this in the heritage of Rails directly. Rails itself was just Basecamp, and then DHH decided to make Basecamp more flexible by pulling out the non-specific stuff to be used as a library for other apps. Now that Rails works and works well, letting people be flexible with it is a natural next step.
But if they'd tried to make it this modular from the start, it never would have gotten finished!
My comment wasn't about you, it was about Rails culture.
"I'm just glad that Rials is bigger than him."
I am too, but for quite some time, Ruby Web tools that offered just such flexibility were derided by the Rails crowd.
So it's amusing to see it embraced now, and considered a Good Thing.