Why aren't ASP.Net MVC Portable Areas Thriving Like Rails Plugins?

I love the idea of the Portable Areas in MvcContrib. After reading up on it, and building a couple for practice, I was surprised not to find a plethora of open source projects leveraging this neat way to distribute features across MVC applications.

Being a guy who has messed around with Rails frequently, I love that I can find a plugin for just about anything. (Comments, Authentication, Search, CMS, Logging, etc.)

However, when searching for Portable Areas, the only ones I see are the samples and an OpenId implementation.

Where is the love for Portable Areas?

Is it too new?
Is there something wrong with the architecture?
Is there just not as thriving an open source community as there is in Ruby world?

Solution

While I cannot answer your question about why there isn't a plethora of plugins using portable areas because this is a subjective question I can tell you why I don't use them: because they rely on custom VirtualPathProvider which don't work if your site is precompiled and I precompile my web applications before shipping.

I use NuGet instead of portable areas and there begin to be a plethora of packages distributed using this technology.