+1 for Sequel. I've decided to try Sequel instead of AR for new project 3 years ago. Never looked back, feels like a breath of fresh air. Hope it will gain more recognition in the Ruby community.
Well, I don't believe rich text editing and websockets are that common to be included in Rails by default. I can't find any excuse for not distributing those features as separate gems.
It's not that hard to add "gem actiontext" to the Gemfile and run "bundle install" if you're one of that 1-2% who needs WYSIWYG.