I disagree that it's a tradeoff, because those two are orthogonal. Java is often hard to decipher because there are many things that can happen dynamically outside the visible code path that affect execution logic, like annotation processing, classloading, dynamic bytecode manipulation, AOP, dynamic proxies, reflection, etc.
Most of those strategies are equally popular in Ruby but without the guardrails that at least make them cumbersome enough to make you think "is this really how I want to approach this?" The pitch for Ruby has always been productivity because it's terser so I'm trying to be charitable here and grant them their greenfield case.
