It is somewhat ironic you chose the word ghetto when discussing Rails, as it reminds of Zed's previous article.

I think it is a good thing for new and maybe even experienced Ruby developers to build their own, to see a way beyond all the meta magic and five minute blogs, and that you really don't need that much plumbing to get things moving and understandable.

At least it didn't say roll Rails in five minutes - it would take much longer than that to bake in all the security holes and to stick YAML parsers all over the shop.