Those are good points. I should say it's not really ActiveSupport that concerned me the most so much as the possibility of other people on my team monkey patching stuff in a similar way, but with much lower quality code. It's almost like all the common dangers of bad programming exist, plus a bunch more at a lower level.

I totally recognize that it's also a strength of ruby. I really enjoyed working with it. It's super expressive and clear to read. ActiveSupport is all really well documented and designed too, and I'm not trying to criticize it.

After re-reading my comment I'm noticing I was specifically targeting Rails as well. I think if anything Rails does a great job and shows why this is a cool thing about ruby. I think what I should have said is that this aspect of ruby is what I found off-putting and specifically in a context where I'm relying on a vast number of dependencies, coworkers of various skill levels, and shipping code to customers. Does that make more sense? I didn't express what I was thinking very well before.