This is so far divorced from my experience, like we're not even thinking about the same software. Rails is very opinionated, and when I've encountered new rail

This is so far divorced from my experience, like we're not even thinking about the same software. Rails is very opinionated, and when I've encountered new rails code bases they are easily legible to me and can readily be understood. Even outside of rails, the largest real pitfalls of clever ruby I've seen are related to gratuitous use of metaprogramming, which one can sometimes encounter if you need to maintain or find a bug in a gem you aren't familiar with. Maybe your problems weren't with rails, but with the programmers of the code bases you were looking at? I believe it's possible to write unmaintainable code in any language.