At the risk of making a lot of enemies: Drupal sucks in many ways (as you rightfully assert), but so does rails and most other frameworks. Frameworks are usually designed by people with an itch to scratch, not by people with a lot of training in how to set up something like a framework in a solid and consistent way.

So right now you'll feel that the grass is greener on the other side, in another 5 years or so you'll know the limitations of rails and you'll realize that the new boss is just the same as the old boss.

The way we do web development in general sucks. We stitch together a jumble of technologies (some scripting language or compile language for the backend, javascript, html, css, SQL and whatever else you want to throw into the mix) in order to produce a user experience that tries to hide all that under a friendly front.

The limitations of this non-consistent development environment are all too visible in the end results and result in a ton of ways to shoot yourself in the foot performance wise or in ways that result in security problems.

The whole concept of 'a framework' needs to be re-visited, it's ugly. But for now it gets the job done.

Good luck on your switch to rails!

(another former drupal fan, now using Yii after a consult by another HN member, a bit closer to rails, much cleaner than drupal, still PHP (that's not a blessing, but also not as much of a curse as it is made out to be)).