Rails is a pretty huge learning curve in and of itself, as most developers need to learn MVC, unit testing, migrations, activerecord, callbacks, filter chains,

Rails is a pretty huge learning curve in and of itself, as most developers need to learn MVC, unit testing, migrations, activerecord, callbacks, filter chains, routing, erb, view helpers, partials, layouts, etc. Of course, all of this stuff makes your life easier once you learn it. I would even be down with making Haml and Sass the default, since most Rails developers seem to use them anyway. Scaffolds would give newbies a good starting point to work with.