> If I had to pick one moment when some of the criticism against Rails began to take hold, even among those who had once favored Rails, it was Zed Shaw's insane rant:

That's simply not true and not fair. Rails of v1-v2 era were much worse than what we have now. Tooling improved immensely since the rant (bundler, rvm) and the most popular ruby implementation itself improved. Granted, it's somewhat harder to start rails today than it was four years before, still we are much better off.