Well, development speed has always been its primary selling point. The reason folks like it is because "Here is common task that you expect to take two hours, and in Rails it's 2 lines of code and you're done."
It's pretty damn awesome to spend all day writing business code rather than support code.
> It's pretty damn awesome to spend all day writing business code rather than support code.
One-thousand times this. I've had some headaches with gems (chronicled earlier), but if you're building an app with minimal add-on gems then development speed is incredibly fast compared to other frameworks.
You're still in the "not-yet-over-the-hump" phase, but my experience with Rails has been that you'll hit this point where it all just clicks, and suddenly you're off to the races.
It's fun to see you chronicle your journeys from the perspective of someone totally new to the language and framework. Please keep it up.
