I'll chime in a little here. First, I think what jQuery does is good for us, good for the web. They've made JavaScript not the blocking factor to making an interactive web experience. If you can learn html and css, and have some design skill, you can make a web site that is interactive and ajaxy and hotness. In general, this lowering of requirements has changed the web. The fact that there are thousands upon thousands of non-programmers making the web more interactive is a good thing (and jQuery isn't the only one who gets credit here).
But we don't *want *to serve that audience. When people show up in our forums with problems the first thing we tell them to do is make a mooshell/jsfiddle. We don't tend to answer many questions along the lines of "how do I use javascript in my blog?" A long, long time ago, our forums were overrun with questions like that, and to be frank, our community suffered for it (and still suffers the perception of being unfriendly to newbies). We very clearly are a programmers framework, and when people show up who don't read the docs and who don't ask teh Google before they ask us, we tend to push back on them to show some code. jQuery doesn't do this. Their scale is a result of that. They are taking the raw masses and showing them that JavaScript is cool. Some very, very small percentage of these people are going to, at some point, grow out of jQuery and look for something more robust. Maybe they'll find Dojo, or Prototype, or YUI, or us. But the point is that we don't really want them before this. It's a tremendous distraction. I don't begrudge jQuery's position in the market. The only thing I regret, really - the only thing - is that if you are a really talented, hardcore JS developer and would be happy using MooTools, Prototype, YUI, or Dojo in your work, it's harder to find a job. The nature of JS frameworks is that it's best to pick one and use it. If you're a bad-ass MooTools developer and get a job at Digg or NetFlix or Mozila, you're out of luck. You'll be using jQuery whether you like it or not. This is the only real reason I wish MooTools were more popular. I'd also like to see everyone on this thread asking themselves what they can do to make MooTools better. Don't just gripe about it. Do the hard stuff. Go fix some bugs. Go write a blog post. Go make a screencast. Go create a plugin and put it in the forge. Get involved. It's not the current devs that are going to make it grow dramatically; we give everything we have already. It's you people that can change this.
