[prophetjohn]

Yes, I agree that knowledge of the ecosystem is important to efficiently create business value. If I don't know that Devise exists and I roll my own auth library, that's a waste of time.

That's different than if I don't know that Sequel exists and I blindly use ActiveRecord. They're both ORMs. They can both read and write data from a database. And guess what — ActiveRecord is better for the vast majority of situations and everyone in the Rails community knows it, so my research into Sequel would have been time wasted.

Rails helps you avoid wasting time on this kind of stuff and pre-packages stuff that most everyone needs and where the alternatives are not substantively different.