Why not? I've found Ruby to be a flexible language. If, for a project, the Rails patterns don't suite my goals, I am confident I can find the packages to come t

Why not? I've found Ruby to be a flexible language. If, for a project, the Rails patterns don't suite my goals, I am confident I can find the packages to come to a solution in good time. Rails popularised Ruby. Ruby offers much more than Rails provides. Based on recent writings, Rails consists of the parts that make DHH happy. I've seen nontrivial projects that use other parts of the language and other packages. I have myself used Ruby in ways wildly different to Rails to achieve my needs. You're also forgetting the time period. Many web projects used PHP and built businesses from them because that was the defacto. Web stuff pretty much meant Apache/PHP/MySQL for a time. Now there are better choices, its easy to say better choices should've been made in retrospect. Then again, that's always the case no matter what the less than ideal decision was without the knowledge of today isn't it?