While I feel sad too, I think the primary reason why it imploded under its own weight was the "magic". I still love Ruby, for all its developer friendliness and the consistency of its idioms. But too much of that sugar leads to bloat, that requires a bunch of hair-pulling for newbies to grok.

Now of course, there exist other simpler frameworks (a la sinatra), but when your posterchild is a thing like Rails, you can't expect people to not be burnt in the long term and still come back.