Sarcasm is really lost on you. Zed Shaw's blog was a pretty big hit when it was posted, because he was a very relevant person in the community (he wrote Mongrel

Sarcasm is really lost on you. Zed Shaw's blog was a pretty big hit when it was posted, because he was a very relevant person in the community (he wrote Mongrel in case you don't place him). The term ghetto stuck to this day, mostly as a joke. As for Rail being "far and away the best choice for developing pretty much any normal web app", that may be true if one define a normal Web app as being a CRUD application with a REST architecture, that covers lots of ground, but still far from universal.