The rubyonrails channel is indeed awful, because of the demographic of people who use rails right now. The ruby channel is much more civil. They are usually unwilling to help on rails-specific issues though.
> "because of the demographic of people who use rails right now"
What do you see as the problem with the demographic?
While I know historically Rails had a heavy conceited, dickhead user base (in Seattle particularly), the demographic has expanded so much that it doesn't seem to be the case overall anymore.
I can't really comment on the actual community at large, but in places where people go to get help, such as the irc channel, there are increasingly a lot of people looking for easy answers who don't seem willing to work things out for themselves. More so than in a lot of other languages. I couldn't attribute this to any specific group of people, but I think it has to do with rails increasingly becoming a "workhorse" tool amongst shall we say, less hackerish web devs.
It's basically a sign that rails is being used more for workaday things, perhaps at the expense of .net or PHP. This is surely a good thing. It isn't the same as the mythic internecine rivalries in the rails/ruby development community everyone always talks about, which I've never thought were that important.
