100%. You can absolutely still just use off-the-shelf Ruby-the-language to get things done, without involving Rails at all, but at this point I think it would

100%. You can absolutely still just use off-the-shelf Ruby-the-language to get things done, without involving Rails at all, but at this point I think it would be just as weird as using awk or perl for writing a command-line program. I love tons of things about Ruby, like first-class/syntactic symbols and especially the pervasive and intuitive (in my opinion) use of blocks in the standard library.