> it seems that Rails is only a benefit if you were unable to make halfway decent library and architecture choices on your own, or if for some reason you benefi

> it seems that Rails is only a benefit if you were unable to make halfway decent library and architecture choices on your own, or if for some reason you benefit from hiring people who are already familiar with a particular Rails version. As far as I can tell you just described almost everyone. I'm a web dev contractor that has jumped around between a few dozen code bases in the past few years, often to clean things up. My experience has been that it doesn't seem matter if the code was written by a team of MIT grads or outsourced to china. With exactly 1 exception, all the home grown framework code bases were in much worse shape, often with huge performance issues. As to why it's so hard for people to mash together their own sets of dependencies in a halfway maintainable way, I have no idea.