> The issue I always had with Rails is that there would come a point where I would want to achieve something which wasn't really in the "blessed path" of a Rails application,

I think this is the first part of the insight needed.

The second part, which by far the most productive full stack web dev I know has got completely nailed, is that mostly the right answer to that is to push back on the business/requirements with a good alternative to what they _think_ they want that _is_ in "the blessed path".

A good Ruby dev who has the ability/skill/respect to do that is maybe the closest thing I've ever seen to the mythical "10x engineer" on a consistently repeatable basis...

And this goes for other things besides RoR too, I've got a Python/Django guy who can build amazing stuff in weeks, but he'll tell me why I am not getting what I asked for but this other thing that does the same job (sometimes better) because "that's the right way to do it with Django".