Someone in DHH's position could approach jQuery and request a subset containing what he needs. And then other projects could benefit from the refactor.<p>If there's even a benefit. This same post by the leader of any other project would involve a study of which components and apps use jQuery. And would state how far back compatibility is to be maintained.<p>So, for example, if commonly used gems require it, or if 90+% of the rails apps in the field require jQuery for other reasons, then this is just code churn for no benefit.<p>And why is this even a "rewrite"? You can suck the relevant lines of code out of jQuery and call it done. This is not a "Summer of Code" length endeavor.