That maybe true (Capistrano which you reference was pulled out of 37 signals) but I think my general criticism still stands (+ standardization in and of itself

That maybe true (Capistrano which you reference was pulled out of 37 signals) but I think my general criticism still stands (+ standardization in and of itself has benefits in that it helps people help each other). The rails community from the beginning has had a more holitstic view of the problem it is solving. The third tab on the rails site is about deployment. There are three performance monitoring companies and 6 different rails specific hosts. Other examples: db schema evolution (migrations) and rake tasks. There is also a litany of useful maintance tools you can find on github. This is not just in reference to code either, its everything else too, including documentation. I like django, I prefer django, but in this one critical area, the last mile, rails does better. And its frustrating because its not a hard problem.