Your points are valid. Understanding the quirks and features of Rails is a lot, too. It sounds like you had to dive head-first into a mess where it was hacked

Your points are valid. Understanding the quirks and features of Rails is a lot, too. It sounds like you had to dive head-first into a mess where it was hacked together by non-Rubyists who learned "just enough" to push to production, and were by no means diligent about following Rails conventions. Obviously, this issue is agnostic of what language one chooses. But it certainly leaves a bad taste when there's all this "magic" happening (see: metaprogramming). That magic is what makes working with Rails so productive. Rails makes it easy to do bad things because of how magical it is. `@post.comments.each { }` when you didn't preload `comments` is bad. This is fixed with `Post.includes(:comments)`. Similarly, if you avoid its conventions — overriding `table_name` on your model, in your example — and try work against it, rather than with it — it becomes more of a chore than it does a treat. Like all frameworks, they require a little bit of diligence and care and understanding to really get the full effect. Rails is great because it makes a lot of assumptions at the cost of brainpower, and for the vast majority of things this is good. It's not always the right tool, and it doesn't need to be. But when it is — again, a large majority of web apps are just CRUD — and when it's written with a little bit of care, it's great.