[bittired]

RVM is not that terrible. If your biggest difficulty in Ruby or Rails is RVM, you haven't been around long.

The cause of problems for beginners is quite simply "change". Rails has been through a few major revisions now, and the jump from 2 to 3 dropped a lot of people (even though 3.1.x+ has been fine), and I doubt many will drop again from 3 to 4, even though there are some big changes. The problem is that with all of the changes comes a bunch of now inaccurate information that no one will update that is found easily, some with high point rankings in S.O.

The more important problem to fix though is leadership. DHH has done a great job, but either he or someone else needs to be more vocal as a single voice leading Rails. It is led by committee currently, and it shows in the lack of vision. However, despite its problems, I'm in it for the long haul. I like it a lot better than everything else.