Amen to that. We had a high-level engineer who sincerely believed that Rails and Postgres were the right tools for Everything. Consequently he shipped a mission-critical query engine whose API is - you guessed it - just ActiveRecord!
It's great if your users are disciplined and experienced Rails engineers who understand how the system works, but we don't live in fantasy land and a year later, we are so very constrained by the unlimited DB access that we're rewriting it all and leaving ActiveRecord out of the equation.
I'll always maintain that Rails is the first tool I'd reach for in a new web startup, and the first one I'd discard after growing past ~20 engineers.
