Earlier quoted context omitted.
Who cares how many people use these frameworks, most of them are using the same MVC structure and are just stealing features from each other. Some of the Node people like things small but when applications get bigger putting things into an MVC structure often makes your code more organized. Until someone comes up with a better idea that takes off this is how things will be done and I think it's great that Node has a…
There's a difference between using an MVC pattern (which is easy with Express, but is completely optional) and relying on an ORM (which the project forces on you). One of the great things about minimilist frameworks like Express is that you can build it out and customize it like you need. The types of projects that benefit from being in node.js instead of Rails, Django, etc, don't really benefit from having all those…
By the project, I presume you mean Rails. Because Rails doesn't force ORM on you. It assumes that by default, but if you don't want to use an RDBMS and ORM, you simply remove the inheritance from ActiveSupport::Base from your model class and write a class that talks to whatever you prefer.
Rails makes the reasonable assumption that most people will be talking to an RDBMS. It could omit that and instead you could "build it out and customize it like you need", but that way lurks 7,000 line XML config files and all the other crap lots of Rails folk were trying to escape from. The point of convention over configuration is that for some baseline assumption of normal, it comes ready to rock and roll.