I'm enjoying Ruby on Rails but one thing that seems overwhelming is the shear number of gems and plugins and their branches that exist out in the wild. Sure I could gem list --remote but that doesn't tell me squat other than confirming that there are hundreds (thousands?) of gems. How are people keeping track of what's hot and what's been left behind? In just about every category there is the old/neglected/out-of-date, a current "standard" or community "poster-child", and one or two up-and-comers.
For example in the Authentication category so far I've found (not to mention the many branches):
- acts_as_authenticated
- restful_authentication
- authlogic
- devise
It seems as though the first two may be on their way out (apologies if I'm wrong). Authlogic appears to be the current "standard" and devise is the up-and-comer? well, i'm making huge assumptions that are surely wrong but that's why I'm looking for answers (not to this authentication example but to the general question).
What/where should I be looking?