But MVC, a templating system, and ActiveRecord/ORM are not obstacles to learning Rails, so much as they are the whole point of learning Rails. Rails exists beca

But MVC, a templating system, and ActiveRecord/ORM are not obstacles to learning Rails, so much as they are the whole point of learning Rails. Rails exists because these design patterns are so powerful and well-established that we all wanted a way to get them "out of the box" instead of having to roll our own implementations of them. Rails is not a good starting point for beginner web developers who don't understand these software design patterns and aren't interested in learning them. If your goal is to just start making websites, like right now, then clearly something like Sinatra is a better choice.