[volaski]

To answer your criticism to the original criticism: 1) Rails is not really THAT expensive, especially when you're just trying to build a small business website. The people who complain are actually the ones who are exactly working on those "funded startup" you mentioned. 2) There are tons of huge apps out there that run on rails just fine. You hear about stuff like Twitter switching to other language because rails is "too slow", but Twitter is like the rarest exceptional case you'll ever find. I mean, do you know of any other web app where realtime is as important as Twitter AND is at such a huge scale? Most websites don't. 3) It's actually more like "Most of the times you use readily implemented libraries and in rare cases you need to use your own". You can't iterate fast when you have the mindset of trying to fix everything. You need to pick the most important problem you're trying to solve and do whatever it takes to reach product market fit as quickly as possible. I have played around with node, express, etc. to build webapps and was at first very intrigued. I did that for a while, and then got frustrated with the lack of convention i can just mindlessly follow as well as all the convenient tools rails provide. So I came back and couldn't be happier.