While we all know that ruby gems have a couple of issues I think one thing was done exactly the way it should be - somehow enforced standard structure: NAME.gemspec, bin, ext, lib, lib/NAME.rb. I don't know if this is specific to only ruby community but there is at least some level of consistency which makes everyone lifes easier.
I will have to carefully read all arguments agains enforcing such structure in bower.
There are various solutions to managing assets in a rails application but we didn't like any of them. The one you linked to requires having separate list of dependencies and using bower directly which means hacking standard rails deployment.
I will have to carefully read all arguments agains enforcing such structure in bower.