I take it you have never tried to get major changes to core server infrastructure approved at large bureaucratic institutions. Writing your code in php is often orders of magnitudes faster, easier and cheaper than getting a decent RoR setup installed.

Let's be clear, we're talking about popularity here. We're talking about the massive popularity of Wordpress and Joomla, of which no Rails project can match. We're talking about the fact that most websites on the web, by that standard, would be "toys". But that doesn't matter, because those toys are what power the web. Not everybody is Facebook, not everybody is looking to secure VC, not everybody is coding their own site.

In fact, I'll go so far as to say that what you're saying is indicative of the kind of out-of-touch response that keeps any of the proposed alternatives from replacing PHP.