Rails is self-described as very "opinionated." In practice, I have found this to mean that if something is difficult I'm not doing what Rails expects me to do.

Sometimes that means I'm not using a mechanism in Rails that does exactly what I want, thereby making life harder for myself. Sometimes that means that means I want something different than the use-case Rails is optimized for. This is still possible, but more complicated. In the balance, this has meant that easy things are easy and hard things are hard.

If it is hard to do something easy, you are probably doing it wrong. Working through some up-to-date Rails tutorials/guides will likely make your life much easier. You still might not like it, but you'll be working with it instead of against it.