[truthisoutthere]

You mentioned 2 essential things: 1. You say it's hard to find good RoR developers 2. Good RoR developers have become super expensive

Ad. 1. To have more Ruby or Rails developers on the job market, you need to train them. Ruby is not a good language to start with because it offers many ways to solve a given problem. Juniors prefer to hear "do it like this" and not "you can do it like this or one way or another". The responsibility lies with the companies, they should patiently train and encourage developers in Ruby because of its advantages. The Python Foundation does a good job because they always say that Python has the best web framework, has the best X and Y (although that's not true). But it works for juniors. In contrary, Rails is a good framework for beginners, as it allows you to hide a programmer's shortcomings through built-in "good practices". It allows you to quickly create a relatively safe advanced product, at the same time giving developers some time to make up for gaps in their skills.

Ad. 2. The developers you knew 10 years ago are now expensive because they gained a lot of experience and are in a different position than they were 10 years ago. New developers are not "good" yet, they have to gather this experience. It has nothing to do with language. Hire less good RoR developers in your startup and let them grow under the watchful eye of 1-2 experienced (expensive) RoR leaders.