im still struggling. there's a lot of magic happening. i'm not bad with the ruby language itself. but i"m so used to first principles. im open to suggestions on improvement here
I personally just don't like Rails. I find it annoying at best, and utterly infuriating at worst.
It's a modern ASP.net - if you want to do dead simple things, Rails does the job quickly and easily, with lots of nice generators, and simple drop in tools.
If you want to do anything outside the happy path, you need to know the entire framework like the back of your hand, because you'll need to unwind the magic and they shoved far too much magic into what should be a simple thing.
And just like ASP.net - the magic changes every version because "best practices" for the web are also changing incredibly quickly. What magic incantation you need depends on which version of the framework you're running, and the docs are bad on this front.
I get Rails - but it is very much not my cup of tea. I don't want to learn their specific DSL and unwind all their magic when I already understand the topic at hand, and just want it to do the thing I'm asking it to.