I would say that that three lost days getting set up is a large, large problem for Rails, though.

Oh, absolutely - but don't confuse a Rails problem with a Ruby problem. It wasn't Rails causing problems, it was Ruby itself.

If I'm getting set up, I really don't distinguish between Rails itself being irritating and one of its dependencies being a PITA. Those dependencies are part of the architecture of Rails, so it gets the blame. It's not like I need foo version of ruby if I'm just doing some quick scripting.

That's 3 days you could spend curing cancer. Tongue in cheek aside, I use to rage when I had to spend 3 days doing server admin and configuration. Along comes heroku and dotcloud and it's a godsend.