Well, as you’ve stated, we believe that experienced Ruby on Rails developers don’t consider deployment to be a problem; probably annoying at most. They’ve automated/standardized the deployment process for a great deal with Capistrano scripts. Newcomers however see deployment as an insurmountable problem. Consequently, we end up having a situation in which the people who can solve the problem either don’t see a problem or aren’t motivated enough to fix the problem, while the people who do see the problem cannot solve it.
Furthermore, from our personal experiences, newcomers usually want to see immediate results. It’s very demotivating for those people to continue using Ruby on Rails if they have to manage tons of obscure configurations and clusters to ‘just successfully deploy an application’. This leads to very intelligent conclusions, such as that “Ruby on Rails sucks”. ;-)
This is exactly what killed my nascent interest in ruby-on-the-web. I continue to love ruby-as-intelligent-shell-script. I may have to give ruby-on-the-web another go.
Rock on. I've been a Rails developer for a year and a half now, and I've never looked back.