You should read http://catb.org/esr/writings/unix-koans/gui-programmer.html

In practice, you'll find grep is in the toolkit of far more Ruby programmers than the IDE Rubymine. And with good reason!

The real problem is step definitions with regex in them. You don't need to do this. Steak was written to avoid this problem: https://github.com/cavalle/steak

But the underlying issue described in this post is still valid - Cucumber is an unnecessary layer because it adds no value that you don't get with Capybara and your favourite testing framework.