Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think it is only part of the core team, frustrated by the lack of progress on sails, so maybe they want some of the same changes you do. Also, while I had my own frustrations with waterline, the auto migrations were meant to speed up development, they were never meant to be used in production and can be turned off with a single line if code.
Once you start shipping to production you care far less about "speed of development" and "prototyping things" and more about "does this actually work". Don't get me wrong, Sails might be very good for prototyping something, but I could recommend it only if your only goal was to prototype something.
I do have quite a few other issues with sails and waterline (ORM). Waterline provided lifecycle hooks, but limited their power and had poor documentation on extending them. Same for sails core itself, it had hooks for writing modules and extensions, but no one outside of the core team knew well how to use them. As for migrations I ended up doing all of my own migrations with knex, I'd love to see knex or sequelize be the core of a new ORM, rather than a quickly cobbled together sql module.
Trails has promised something better on a lot of these fronts through modularity, I hope they deliver.