I know numerous people who have started using Rails only recently and use plenty of gems and plugins (and even write/distribute their own in some cases).
There are muppets everywhere, but I don't think they dominate the Rails community.
There are muppets everywhere, but I don't think they dominate the Rails community.
Rails still looks hopelessly monolithic to a perl dev though - we can't quite see why you'd want to ship a DB library in core when, hey, web apps don't -all- talk to SQL databases.
As for the quality of said DB library, well, many smart ruby developers have torn it to pieces quite adequately so I'll just say "google is your friend" and not bother with a half-informed opinion of my own.
If you can't see why a web app framework might want to ship a DB library, you're blind.