I had this problem coming from a C# background into Rails. I found myself wasting a lot of time doing the same things you're doing. Ultimately though the gains

I had this problem coming from a C# background into Rails. I found myself wasting a lot of time doing the same things you're doing. Ultimately though the gains far outweighed any initial slowness. Of course this is most likely a result of Rails than plain old Ruby (dynamic language). My takeaway is, don't get discouraged by the initial 3 months of wonkiness, it'll get better the more familiar you are with the language. For larger codebases though, I vastly prefer strongly typed languages.