Yeah, did Yehuda quit so much as fade into the background? He's clearly a guy who likes ambitious projects. His contributions to the Ruby community have been notable because of their challenging nature. Merging Merb and Rails was a gargantuan project, getting a large established framework to accept that level of outside input was impressive. The level of refactoring that went into it went against prudence, but I can't argue with the results. Rails 3 is awesome.
Similarly Yehuda and Carl spearheaded Bundler development. They bit off a massive problem that touches anyone doing large scale ruby development and through sheer force of will hammered out a powerful solution that solves the majority of common issues in a relatively straightforward manner. There's lots to argue with, for sure, maybe it's over-engineered, maybe they didn't work closely enough with RubyGems core, etc; but at the end of the day they solved a problem that was too hairy for the average dev to have much hope of solving.
Yehuda's been there, done that. He doesn't need to stick around and be Rails core forever, there's plenty of new blood to pick up the torch, and bigger problems to solve elsewhere.
Similarly Yehuda and Carl spearheaded Bundler development. They bit off a massive problem that touches anyone doing large scale ruby development and through sheer force of will hammered out a powerful solution that solves the majority of common issues in a relatively straightforward manner. There's lots to argue with, for sure, maybe it's over-engineered, maybe they didn't work closely enough with RubyGems core, etc; but at the end of the day they solved a problem that was too hairy for the average dev to have much hope of solving.
Yehuda's been there, done that. He doesn't need to stick around and be Rails core forever, there's plenty of new blood to pick up the torch, and bigger problems to solve elsewhere.