[realntl]

To be fair, a great many of web apps can justifiably say "my domain is the data store." In fact, whenever I use BaseCamp, that's exactly what strikes me almost immediately. Stock rails tends to be a great fit in those cases; your business objects are bags of data. Of course, those projects don't happen to be all that interesting to work on technologically, but I wouldn't want to work on MS Access "apps," either.

[karmajunkie]

That's incidental isomorphism between the two, and its different from your domain being your data store. You're right, there's a great many apps that can get away with it for awhile. And for those apps that fit in that mold and just kind of stall out or never grow, more power to them. Any app that continues to grow in terms of features or scale WILL break out of that mold—unless they're tethered so tightly to it that it becomes an anchor (which, let's face it, is most rails apps in the wild.)