Ive heard the complete opposite is true. That rails while improved is still a pain to deal with. THe benefit of tails is that theres more and more people using it so theres some expertise out there.

mod_rails/Passenger changed the game on deployment of Rails - Rails deployment is no harder than PHP if you use Passenger/Apache. Most of the 'Rails is hard to deploy' opinions are just relics from the bad old days.

high volume/high availability setups can be complicated, but that's the same all over...

I dont actively follow the rails communitee so maybe what i heard was a while back. I know rails and ruby in general are becoming probably the most actively developed communitee in relation to other languages frameworks. So as you say many of the issues are being resolved very quickly and effeciently.

Im not the biggest fan of rails, i kind of like padrino actually, however i do like ruby and have found some very cool people within the communitee.

Having worked full time in both .NET environments and now in Ruby/Rails, the toolkit in the ruby community is very robust and a far better experience. Any of our developers can do a production deployment with one command and do it with zero downtime. In .NET, it was never as elegant.

The problem is something gets started in the infancy of a framework or tooling and continues to get propagated. The "hearing" rather than "using".

Interesting. I'm a full-time Ruby and Rails developer, and I host/manage a few Rails sites personally. I'd beg to differ with whom you've been speaking. As betageek said, mod_rails makes it a breeze, plus it can be used with either Apache or Nginx.

Like any opinion, people are bound to have different ones. Using something like Passenger, you just put your app somewhere on your box, and add two lines to your httpd.conf, and you're done. I use nginx/unicorn, but it's still really easy.