There is also shard init with a smaller template.
And this topic Proposal: Download project templates with crystal init
I would personally like to see some cli that could be used as init & generator that could be used for different frameworks and types of projects. But I am not sure what is the ideal design of such tool to allow project template, and expansions on existing code bases.
Without such a tool I think that any improvement to crystal init is not a real game changer.
I know there will always be guides here and there for how to do X, but crystal init serves that directly to the user and it reduce the burden.
Although Github Action is a very attractive option for github repos the setup for travis is still the simplest one to start with.