Having been there, I don't know what you missed but it sounds like a lot.
The project promised a lot in the beginning and some folks new to a language like Ruby were so enthused by what they could do that they didn't pay much attention to the admin drama at the beginning.
I was there too - I didn't "miss a lot", I just ignored it. The community was still vibrant, helpful, and the language/tools were developing nicely. So some people with big egos (ZS, DHH etc.) were causing waves. Who cares. I don't get swept up in that sort of thing. Not letting it affect you is different from not being aware of it, it just means not getting involved with it.
I'm still very happy with Ruby itself, and how it's developed, and Rails too. While I haven't used it professionally in a while, it's still the language I most enjoy working in. I also used it to get my daughter (now finished college and working as a SWE) into programming when she was a child, and currently using it to introduce my 9 yr old son to coding.
I think Ellen Dash, André Arko, Samuel Giddins, Martin Emde, and even Mike McQuaid could be proposed as individuals who care. In addition to the hundreds of people commenting here.
> While I haven't used it professionally in a while, it's still the language I most enjoy working in.
Perhaps now that you're up to date on some important issues in the Ruby community, you can get involved and help right the ship so the language you love will exist in a few years.
I don't really want to continue debating the other points, but I will say one last thing. There's a difference between caring about the language/ecosystem/community, and caring about the drama introduced by certain individuals. I care very much about the former, and I believe the latter to be an unhelpful distraction rather than something to be "solved". But that's just me.
And just to clarify: when I say "who cares", I was talking about some of this drama in the past, egos and whatnot. I am _not_ talking about what just happened now with RubyCentral. I consider that to be a serious problem with real-world consequences that go beyond disputes/differences of opinions. It's no way to handle OSS and treat maintainers. It does put a bad stain on RubyCentral, which is unfortunate.
that's an unfair take; the Ruby community was excellent at the beginning