True that gems often do more than I need, but should I? 1) Write my own authentication code 2) Write my own ical feed code (just added this in about 2 hours using ri_cal, which has way more features than I need) 3) Write my own code to inline css in email 4) Write my own Facebook API library 5) Write my own admin interface 6) Write my own SCSS and HAML processors 7) Write my own file attachment and processing code 8) Write my own background processing library 9) Write my own CSS/JS compression library

You get the point.

I use gems that save me tons of time. If not for gems, I would not be using Rails.