Here's an example. I wanted to add some diagnostics to my app, but only if we're running with a certain log-level enabled. In Java, with commons.logging, I'd do this by checking 'if (LOGGER.isDebugEnabled()). "Ok," I figure, "rails has a reasonably full-featured logging infrastructure, there must be some way to do this..." So I google for 'rails logging configuration' and arrive at this page from the official Rails wiki:
http://wiki.rubyonrails.org
Lo and behold, this "helpful" page is just SMEARED with markup from angry developers, complaining about how the rails-modified logger doesn't work as documented, as intended, or as they expect that it should.
More and more, my impression of rails is this: it's fine if you just want to throw together a small-scale website with attractive AJAX features. But if you intend to build an app that needs to be computationally intensive, or scalable, or support complex data-structures, trying to build it in rails is going to hurt more than it helps. So far, my experience has been best with SpringFramework MVC and a whole bunch of jakarta-commons support.