but the first few times it can easily be half a day lost just trying to get the environment working.
The above steps are reasonably robust and implicitly teach you things about your programming environment that you must learn (or at least have seen) as early as possible.
We should decidedly not dumb that down. There must be one canonical installation procedure for everyone and it must be as easy as above. There must not be "an easy way" and "a hard way". The above is as easy as you can make it without hiding crucial information from the user.
Rails has plenty of harmful padding already, we need less of that, not more.
You don't need to learn those things as early as possible. You need to learn them eventually, as you're getting closer to gaining expertise. Accidental complexity early along the road to expertise is a hinderance not a help.
The complexities of setting up a system so you can develop rails on it exist to solve problems that experts have discovered through years of working with the system, but which people coming to it fresh don't, and shouldn't need to, know that they have yet.
The above steps are reasonably robust and implicitly teach you things about your programming environment that you must learn (or at least have seen) as early as possible.
We should decidedly not dumb that down. There must be one canonical installation procedure for everyone and it must be as easy as above. There must not be "an easy way" and "a hard way". The above is as easy as you can make it without hiding crucial information from the user.
Rails has plenty of harmful padding already, we need less of that, not more.