My take on Ruby was that it's easy to get into and very malleable into whatever you want, but because of that people can get set in their ways and write code in a way that other rubyists may not be able to decipher (where Python was described to me as there only being ONE valid way to do it: the Python way).

I'm leery of Ruby on Rails because of the average quality of apps I see being produced by it, I don't want to start down a path that can't lead to polished great product in the end.

Are there more valuable approaches to Ruby than picking up RoR that we could go after - or maybe I'm just way off base here and have been hearing biased things. I'd love to hear why Ruby is a good fit as it seems like it can get pretty messy pretty fast...