> The issue I always had with Rails is that there would come a point where I would want to achieve something which wasn't really in the "blessed path" of a Rails application, and then I would end up with something that felt like a hack to circumvent Rails' default behavior.

As a Rails developer for over 10 years now, I definitely agree that going off the rails (see what I did there?) is nearly always painful. Especially if Rails doesn't totally click for you. I can see why that would drive a lot of people totally nuts.

I think that if Rails really clicks for you then it's possible find a way to solve those problems within the same sort of way of thinking that Rails is coming from. But not everyone works the same way, and that's ok!

> Also as far as the natural-language-like syntax, I find that Swift offers a similar benefit, with the added benefit of strong compile-time checks.

Life is short, if at all possible write code in whatever language makes you happy. If that's Swift for you, well then cheers!