I think one of the main things missing from the Grails 3 narrative is that it has really turned into an opinionated SpringBoot framework. You can take all the great things from spring, add groovy and gorm and a few sane defaults and it becomes a pretty powerful framework.
"Opinionated"? That's a Golang marketing word, you can't use that! Some other points:
* Grails 3 also ships with Gradle 2.x (as well as Groovy and Spring)
* Grails 2.5.x is shipping upgrades whenever Grails 3.0.x does (for when you don't want to rebuild your project to use Grails 3)
* the decision on what constituent technologies Grails 3 ships was made before Pivotal pulled its funding for it
I read between the lines here and deduce the Grails owner was trying to take over management of the Spring group at Pivotal, just like he did the Groovy language, and was positioning for some control of Gradle as well. If his plot didn't work, he'd still have Grails 2.x to sling around.
