Nothing earth-shattering in this post...just wanted to note my good experiences with:

• formtastic: I had looked into the air_budd_form_builder and RubyPond's semantic_form_builder but moved on to formtastic after liking its concise approach to building forms.
• suspenders: Not too heavy for a Rails starter app with lots of nice development plugins from the thoughtbot folks.
• paperclip: Really easy file attachments for ActiveRecord.