E.g. take Camping (a micro-web-framework that fit in 4K of code) - it is fascinating as a demonstration of some of the things you can do in little space. It is beautiful as art. It has provided inspiration for a lot of us that finds Rails unnecessarily bloated.
It is also totally unreadable for ordinary developers, weird and quirky to the point that if someone had checked something like Camping into one of our work repos, it'd be a "ha-ha, now seriously where is your actualy code?" moment.
The Ruby community appreciates code as art, and is probably more than others inclined to blur the boundary between it and what we will accept or even embrace in production systems. But _why's stuff is mostly firmly on the art side.
There are exceptions, e.g. Hpricot was a nice first try that demonstrates some of _why's skill in terms of creating pleasing interfaces, and he deserves credit for that even though HPricot itself has been largely superseded by Nokogiri.
1) Drama: fair point.
2) Personality cult: Not as sure. I've seen more than one newb told "don't waste your time" on the Poignant guide in Ruby forums. why's weakness as a coder is pretty widely recognized. In my opinion maybe over-estimated, esp. relative to people like DHH.
3) To me - I learned Ruby when Rails was in its infancy and the Agile salesmen had barely just hitched their wagon to it - why represents a more innocent period of the Ruby community.
Ruby was really a wonderful place - not-especially talented programmers could explore relatively sophisticated programming language features in a safe sandbox. Everything you'd been doing with Perl or whatever you could do with blocks and lambdas and even call/cc if you didn't mind a huge performance hit (naturally you didn't.)
Maybe it's nostalgia, but I think there was a time when MINSWAN actually meant something. Now, every doofus with a self-rolled YAML parser thinks he's the Steve Jobs Memorial Arbiter of Proper Design over Earth and All Satellites Thereof.
4) Yes, it is strange. But then, this is a Perl- and Smalltalk-based language from Japan.