As I was thinking of the key goals I want to achieve as Rico moves to 1.2, I came across a new post by Andy Hunt on Why Ruby. He talks about how one of the two main reasons he likes ruby is that it "stays out of your way". I agree that Ruby does a great job in this area by allowing itself to be molded to the problem at hand without getting in the way.
This is probably one of the hardest and yet most important goals of any framework, language, library, application, or tool. I think a good framework/library should allow itself to be shaped to easily work with required technologies and processes that are in place. Being opinionated is great, but only in the areas that the user does not want to worry about.
One of the tricks is to understand what are the required technologies 'it' must work with. In the area of javascript libraries that clearly means existing HTML and CSS content.
So number 1 goal is to "stay out of your way".
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