[bunderbunder]

I think there's definitely something to this.

Another that I think makes a big difference is that Microsoft has historically charged money for reasonably featureful versions of their dev tools. I think it leads a lot of people who work in .NET during the day to do hobby work on some other platform. The freely available dev tools for Ruby might not be any more featureful than Visual Studio Express, but the simple fact that you're working on a different platform from the one where you get to work with all these high-end power tools during the day means you notice that difference less.

Hopefully the new Community Edition will change that that situation.