tl/dr Rails is not the new hotness anymore, the Rails 3 rewrite was a waste of time and it's strayed far from its initial ease of use. Node & Coffeescript, the new hotness, are awesome, here's my new video series, the first one's free.
Personally, it feels a bit revisionist, because I distinctly remember the Rails fans in 2006/2007 talking about how easy Rails made web development. But... perhaps my mind is playing tricks on me as I get older.
Again, my memory tells me that supporters at the time promoted it as easy as well, but I'm not finding much particular support material from 2006 on Rails (perhaps my google/archive-fu needs work).
I've only played around with Rails 3 (I'm following Michael Hartl's tutorial) and have never used Rails 2, but I don't see how new Rails features like `has_secure_password` or the asset pipeline (which is super dead simple) make Rails 3 any harder. It seems like the opposite — perhaps someone who has developed on both major versions can enlighten me?
And as for overly ceremonial code, let me tell you about my balls. I actually have a rake task to scratch my balls. Somebody told me a good entrepreneurial programmer writes code to scratch their own itch, and I took them literally. The code uses a serial port to power an Arduino board. The Arduino's got a servo with a backscratcher attached. I keep it on a shelf at scrotum height underneath my desk. I literally need to type bundle exec every single time I want to scratch my balls. I don't like having to type bundle exec every single time I scratch my balls. I named the task balls, so I can type rake balls, because it rakes my balls, and Bundler pisses all over my tidy syntax, but am I going to complain? Am I going to point out that asking me to type bundle exec every time I want to scratch my own balls shows incredible contempt for me as a user, particularly considering that the whole reason I'm a user of this particular thing is because I work in a language which was designed to optimize for programmer happiness? Of course not. It's not productive or helpful to say that, so I simply type bundle exec rake balls and scratch my balls in sullen silence. Typing bundle exec every single time I want to scratch my balls is the epitome of the overly ceremonial code which Rails defined itself against from 2005 to 2007.
The problem with tl/dr is that it misses out on the funny. :-(
Maybe my laptop is underpowered, but three seconds to do essentially nothing is still a long time
In my own project (SproutCore), we've used Ruby-based buildtools since 2007, and there is unanimous support to move to Node, precisely because running a modern Ruby stack requires so much education.
We want to spend time in our IRC channel on SproutCore itself, not Ruby and it's myriad problems (all of which have "fixes" that "aren't so hard").
We're also moving to Node because the performance of the Ruby tools sucks, despite three rewrites (one by a member of the Rails core team, so not Ruby n00bs).
The Node tooling? It's so fast that we can literally rebuild the entire project from scratch every time we reload the app and still load everything into the browser in under a second. Oh, and it took about a day to write. :/
That, to me, is why Node is taking off. The "I can get shit done quickly" factor is very high, the resulting code runs very fast, and the community is large, energetic, and helpful. Plus, pretty much everyone has to use JavaScript today.
Education about what? Can you give some specifics here? I'm genuinely curious as my day-to-day ruby development is pretty smooth and I haven't been doing it very long.