[bsnape]

I think you're perhaps missing the point in one or two places.

Cucumber helps techies (devs, testers, etc.) and non-techies (product owners, scrum masters etc.) work collaboratively. I don't think the authors of Cucumber ever said that it enables non-technical people to 'read and understand the underlying code'.

Ultimately though, I agree with your conclusion but for slightly different reasons. I use both RSpec and Cucumber daily; they are both awesome and provide a similar end result. I enjoy writing Cucumber features but in certain circumstances it doesn't scale for large/complex applications (in my experience). I think that this isn't a problem for many people though, unless they're doing something wrong 'under the hood'.