@Floppy Briefly describe your plan, and I'd probably want to join.
I have been writing Ruby code for some twenty years; very rarely touched any Rails. Ended up making a couple of things that do some things that Rails does, albeit differently; the one that had most staying power was a basic application server framework I dubbed Pyramid; its most distinct characteristic was focusing on #LiterateProgramming kind of application development. It used to be proprietary; things have changed since, and now I have full rights to it, although haven't done a public release yet. Insomuch as it would make sense, I'd be happy to share and/or adapt some Pyramid code.
(Tempted to suggest naming the new project Ziggurat, after the Asimov quip about cavemen's railroads and ziggurats being built without computers. It kind of ... fits?)