Almost a cliché — comparing simple (and poor-designed, in this case) language to a complex framework. If we'll try to compare — PHP is just a quite thin layer

Almost a cliché — comparing simple (and poor-designed, in this case) language to a complex framework. If we'll try to compare — PHP is just a quite thin layer above HTTP — you get $_REQUEST/$_SERVER and you write data back. So it's easy to learn "ground-up". Compared, Rails is an extremly complex infrastructure filled with lots of magic. So, the only way for newbie to learn it is to write code without understanding how they work internally — it would take too much time to do it the other way. And when you learned PHP (then invented your own "DB abstraction layer module" bicycle, haha; then learned some simple framework; and so on...) you expect to learn Rails the same way, which is almost impossible due to its complexity.