[joedev]

You're doing it wrong! Do not slap frameworks and complexity on top of Rails. Rails' strength has been unchanged from day 1 - "favoring convention over configuration".

Rails is for building web apps. 99% of the world's web apps will work fine with Rails, an RDMBS, a web server. That's about all you need. Anything else is probably just developers wanting to play with the latest toys.

So yes, if you try to avoid Rails' conventions, you will have trouble. But it's not Rails' fault.