There is definitely a learning curve. For me, Rails was unapproachable until I started to give up the idea that I needed a ton of custom stuff in my stack. The "allure" I saw of pulling together a basic routing system and hooking things up by hand completely disappeared after building a pretty substantial web app in _Sinatra_.

Rails makes a lot of decisions for you, but the decisions it makes are the _right_ ones. It's like having a "best practices" box that you can just shove your custom system into, rather than trying to build them in yourself. It's really quite something.

For context: I basically learned Rails by way of building a proof of concept election management system in Rails in about three weeks (more like 1.5 in actual programming time). It also stored votes on a blockchain (ethereum). Even with a relatively complex storage system and interaction model, the Rails best practices left me with a really satisfactory application in no time flat. Perfect for a fast PoC.

Depending on how long ago, I've noticed that the comprehensiveness of third party documentation (i.e. googling "how do I x?") can really change the experience.

My memories of trying to install Linux circa 2000? Not favorable. Though to be fair I was a lot younger then too.