I looked into rails in some detail about a year ago, and I think it's the only pretty good solution for this I've come across—but there's a steep up front cost in learning/setup etc. (or so it seems).
It's best to pick a project and try to build it, rather than learn things from the outside. In isolation, Ruby can be annoying to learn because it's syntactic sugar seems unnecessary. In context of an app, though, it's great. The sugar makes sense.
Rails has a bit of a learning curve, but that learning curve is well rationalized. To borrow a Steve Jobs-ism: you're starting on the 10th floor, when everyone else is starting on the 2nd floor. Out of the box, you get a killer asset pipeline and complete MVC system that's standardized and conventional.
You can throw together a well built webapp without cutting corners in a fraction of the time doing it by hand. Things like a solid REST API practically come free with Rails. That's really valuable.
This is what I used to jump from "I've hacked on a rails 3 app and gone through some ruby Katas" to "I am building out a full fledged SaaS product in a Rails 4 app as technical co-founder".
The community is so big, and so focused on conventions over configurations, usually googling "rails <questions>" returns a LOT of links to stack overflows and blogs that clearly explains everything.
Rails offer so much syntactic sugar/plug and play gem systems that usually things are setup in fewer lines of code than anywhere else.
The downside is that it's easy to build something while barely having any idea how it works, but if you want something up quickly (or if you already know how things work) then it's perfect.
There is definitely a learning curve. For me, Rails was unapproachable until I started to give up the idea that I needed a ton of custom stuff in my stack. The "allure" I saw of pulling together a basic routing system and hooking things up by hand completely disappeared after building a pretty substantial web app in _Sinatra_.
Rails makes a lot of decisions for you, but the decisions it makes are the _right_ ones. It's like having a "best practices" box that you can just shove your custom system into, rather than trying to build them in yourself. It's really quite something.
For context: I basically learned Rails by way of building a proof of concept election management system in Rails in about three weeks (more like 1.5 in actual programming time). It also stored votes on a blockchain (ethereum). Even with a relatively complex storage system and interaction model, the Rails best practices left me with a really satisfactory application in no time flat. Perfect for a fast PoC.
Depending on how long ago, I've noticed that the comprehensiveness of third party documentation (i.e. googling "how do I x?") can really change the experience.
My memories of trying to install Linux circa 2000? Not favorable. Though to be fair I was a lot younger then too.
