I first experimented with Rails in the 0.7 days, and stuck with it until sometime in the early 2.x series. The general complaint you mention about "it got in my

I first experimented with Rails in the 0.7 days, and stuck with it until sometime in the early 2.x series. The general complaint you mention about "it got in my way and I had to abandon it" is basically at the top of my list. As Rails evolved, it picked up a _lot_ of cruft, and when things went subtlely wrong (or I was trying to track down a "magic" method) it was just a big pit of morass to dig through. About that time (nearly 3 years ago) I switched to Merb, the new kid on the block. That's had its own share of pain to deal with, and at work we're now figuring it'll be worth it to migrate back to Rails 3. The Rails/Merb "merger" has resulted in a lot of good architectural cleanup, and being able to live within the regular plugin ecosystem has a lot to say for it (namely, we won't need to maintain the dozen-odd forks for merb support anymore).