History will remember the entire Ruby industry as a series of compounding failures.
The de facto formalisation and specifications.
The black-box behaviour of core development.
The broken-linked, un-versioned docs.
The rampant cargo-cult mentality.
The arcane exceptions.
The meta-frameworks.
Gem hell.
1.9/2.0
Rails.
No technology stack is perfect, but I've yet to meet a stack that was pure evil. There may be some cargo-cult personalities in the Ruby community, but, if there is, it's only because there is value in it.
An infinitesimal number of sites have to deal with Twitter's scale problems. The rest can work on getting crap done instead of worrying about Maseratti problems.
Cargo-culting is what you accuse others of when they are learning and you do not like them.
The appropriate way to deal with newbies who do not fully understand the consequences of the decisions they have made (perhaps even while they are advocating others join them), is to explain their rhetorical and technological shortcomings in a way that others can learn from. Accusing someone of "cargo-culting" is just unhelpful character assassination.
Also, weak-sauce.
As someone who has seen Ruby cause major problems I'd have to say it's not too far off "pure evil"
This is a bit dramatic. Despite its faults, the language and community around it have been quite a success story. It's had a huge and positive influence on the web development world.
The Ruby community, really really cares about developer tooling and teaching others. Ruby is also one of the nice places where object oriented programming touches metaprogramming.
Don't forget that a lot of sysadmin work is done in Ruby now. Both Puppet and Chef are written in Ruby, and that Github and Heroku both came up out of the Ruby community.
Is this really a problem? Every package/dependency manager seems to blow up on occasion. Gems haven't given me the problems that I've had with Pip/CPAN/Autoconf.
So what people used to call "gem hell" was actually "I need to specify all my dependencies and take care of conflicts myself." That's what bundler does. And it uses rubygems to actually retrieve, install and load the gems.
There are things more funny to do than solve bugs introduced by a backported patch.