[hunvreus]

Well, for us updating a query for example is not much of a hassle. However, we often found ourselves quickly iterating on the workflows and UI elements. That, from experience again, has been traditionally much more painful to deal with when we had a more complex CMS underneath.

With a clean separation of client and server, we've been able to deal with these changes more easily, being able to prototype something HTML5 + CSS and quickly transforming this prototype into the real final product. Working with fewer layers in between you and the actual code (effectively HTML5 + CSS + JS helped too.

I'm not questioning your ability to be proficient at it with a CMS (or Rails). I am much more comfortable with our current approach though.