I may be misunderstanding you, but can you elaborate on why you believe you need "top-tier" Ruby/Rails talent to run a performant Rails application? In my expe

I may be misunderstanding you, but can you elaborate on why you believe you need "top-tier" Ruby/Rails talent to run a performant Rails application? In my experience, you need no more than mid-level talent. You need a certain % of people who are strong at working with databases to ensure good (normalized, indexed, etc) database design. You also need a certain level of organizational will to avoid letting a Rails monolith get absolutely out of control, but this is less "a need for top-level talent" and more "just stick to boring old Ruby/Rails best practices." Those are, of course, things you need when working with any stack. I don't find them to be Ruby/Rails specific.