This was me, until three years ago. I am freelancer, all my gigs, clients and my whole network was about Drupal. Hell, I still receive requests for Drupal work on a weekly basis: my name was established, so almost impossible to move out of Drupal.
So I wrote some op-eds on why Drupal was not always a good choice for projects (most notably: government projects) citing from my experience as rescue-consultant-for-failing-drupal-projects.
And then I wrote http://berk.es/2012/10/01/farewell-drupal/ and declined all work Drupal related.
It does not have to be Rails. It could be Opal, Django, Spring, Symphony, Yii, anything. But if you are really unhappy with Drupal, as you seem to be, cut the ties. There's more then enough work out there.
And working in an environment that is built for developers (instead of building a webapp by clicking checkboxes and clumsy html interfaces in the Drupal backend). Move to a community that encourages clean code, "craftmanship", designs, patterns and so on, you will become a better programmer. If that is what you want.
I'm now a happy Rails developer. Who learns new things every day. I like my job a lot; so much, that I can't imagine not coding for work (And already I am almost always that Old Guy on the job). In ten years it'll probably not be Rails anymore, but WhateverFancyFramework is the default then. And because within Rails I really learned coding, picking up new languages, frameworks and whatnots is not that hard at all, anymore.
I mostly just do everything else in the org - infrastructure, architecture, mgmt, etc - and let the other guys actually do the Drupaling. Drupal is a minimal part of what I do day to day now, so it's not as if I hate my job. Quite the contrary. And I'm constantly learning new things and getting better as a dev, not just a Drupal dev. And the only one of my "really big ideas" that has yet to be implemented is the one where we build a custom (Rails) CMS and get out of Drupal/Features hell for good. And my boss doesn't even hate on the idea, it's just not the front burner item yet. The time will come, oh yes. It will...
Good bumping into you again.
Hopefully, Drupal 8 is going to bring all those fun parts again.
I'm not all that deep in Drupal anymore, but from what I hear: I doubt it.
Drupal has to choose a target audience and focus on that. If they choose "developers", then it will become a great tool that is fun to develop in, no doubt.
But as long as it remains in a limbo between "end-users" (the one's browsing the site you are building), "webmasters/editors" (those managing the content and configuring tidbits) and "developers" this won't happen.
There are just too many conflicting interests there. Real use case: can a webmaster change some settings in the image-cache? certainly not! Changing the width of an image will break all your carefully crafted CSS grids: it is tightly coupled to the Theme (which lives in Git and goes through a release-cycle).
If Drupal chose "developers", a thing like "imagecache" won't even exist in its current set-up. It won't have a database to store its settings, nor a web-interface. Instead it would be an Image class that you can inherit and then define some settings and methods in order to get an image-derivative.
From what I've seen, Drupal 8 does not change this conceptual basis. So I highly doubt it is possible to develop sites when your basis is conflicting with what you want to do on such a crucial level.
On the one hand, if there's not a large market uptake of Drupal 8, there won't be any reason for community devs to learn all the new ins and outs when they could just learn the ins and outs of something smaller and simpler. On the other hand, if there's not a decent D8 developer pool for companies to hire from then I don't know how there could be a large market uptake...
How did those go down and what happened after you wrote them (both from the community & potential clients)?
I am sorely tempted to publish some I've written about a CMS over the last 3 years, but prudence has kept me silent so far.
Quite some people felt betrayed and were angry. Thing is, though, what I wrote was simply provable true. Backed up with numbers and such. So, I could conteract with "well, then show me what facts are wrong".
For myself, I felt relieved and a little sad. Sad that I could not achieve what I worked so hard for: to make Drupal the best framework for developers to build CMSes with.
The realisation that this was not going to happen, made me angry too. Untill the moment that I realised that pushing Drupal into a direction "it" did not want to go was frustrating. But also that, instead of turning Drupal into a Rails, I'd rather use Rails instead: why spend energy turning it into a framework that already exists, and that I can use today, without spending that energy. (I believe this mechanism is one of the greatest threats to WordPress, Drupal, Joomla and many other PHP-frameworks: once people grow into better programmers, they often simply leave, instead of pulling their framework up with them, to higher levels).
I have this dream of not having to work with Drupal ever again, so I often daydream about what I'd build if I were given the chance. In a sense I'm in the same position as you, except that it's probably never going to happen and that I've been thinking about this for years.
I'd go Rails, and here's why.
Rails is easy to learn - even if your team has never written Ruby it's an easy language to pick up with way fewer gotchas than either PHP or JS. I've evaluated Laravel, and it's probably the best PHP option out there right now, but knowing Rails, I often find myself hating how much code you have to write to accomplish the same thing in Laravel just by virtue of it being PHP. The resulting code feels clunky (though, that's surely just because I also suck at programming).
Rails is extremely mature - it's been around for over a decade. The upgrade from 2 to 3 was painful, the upgrade from 3 to 4 was much less so. I imagine the upgrade from 4 to 5 will be as well, and so on. The ecosystem is very filled out, the package mgmt story is there, the testing story is there. These are new developments on the wider PHP scene that will probably takes several more years to reach the level of adoption and familiarity that Ruby enjoys. I love writing JS, but the whole ecosystem over there is in this constant state of tectonic upheaval right down to the language (ES6), and unlearning the old gotchas so I can learn the new ones doesn't appeal to me right now.
Rails is exceptionally well documented in terms of blog posts, the Rails Guides, and the API docs. None of these other technologies even come close. This is especially true of Laravel, and I've only ever read 1 blog post about Phoenix, so good luck with that.
This was supposed to be short, sorry.