The Ruby community in general, and the Rails community in particular, likes to style itself as people who care about people. "Matz is nice so we are nice" (MINSWAN) is a cornerstone concept that the community passes around. As a result, they have a tendency to care about this sort of thing; community standards of behavior didn't get bolted-on later, they were there at the start.

I once watched a Rails community member pretty well pillory someone for entertaining the thought experiment that if ReiserFS were more technically competent, the software-engineering community wouldn't care the creator murdered his wife and would still invite him to speaking engagements telecast from jail. It is therefore interesting to watch how the Rails community is reacting to the Rails creator having concerns not nearly as bad as killed-his-wife, but extremely disquieting nonetheless.