Having spent a morning this week showing journalism students at Mizzou how to install Django, I would very much like the ability to say "oh you want to try rails? Just download Postgres.app and Tokaido.app and you're set."
Also, this is a weird conversation to be having with a dude who has a book for teaching beginners Ruby (http://ruby.bastardsbook.com/ )!
Ha! I'm all about teaching beginners how to use Ruby, which is painful in itself. By the time they get to Rails, they had better be used to typing in commands at a text prompt :)
No seriously, though...So many things can easily go wrong with basic Rails...not because Rails is bad, but because Rails has so many features...that if people haven't mastered the art of Googling lines from debug-output or command-line install instructions...then the time they've "saved" by having a push-button solution will be more than spent in the time trying to get off the ground.
But I'm obviously speaking from hindsight...as I've gotten more experienced, I've seen that writing script for minimal apps is more efficient than launching a full-fledged Rails app. However, I may have lost interest in the whole web-app game long ago if I didn't have the chance to play around (clumsily) with Rails 2.2
Also, this is a weird conversation to be having with a dude who has a book for teaching beginners Ruby (http://ruby.bastardsbook.com/ )!