At the risk of sounding harsh, it sounds like maybe you and the OP are just not interested in bucking down and learning more about the language. I tried to learn "Rails" by itself, but decided that learning Ruby (and I mean all of it, not just learning how to write an if statement) is the only way to really be able to use Rails. I can now (a) understand what's going on and (b) !!bonus!! I can write better code in Rails because I can bend Ruby to my will.
And it's not really bias; I come from a generalist perspective. I worked in Python for about two years, and it's the same way as Ruby. Any library or language is going to require a lot of learning to really master. I floundered in Python until I broke down and basically read through the API reference front to back. And with regards to what's going on behind the scenes, I found Django no different than Rails. Perhaps a little more obfuscated with the way templates and the auto-admin work, but I didn't have as much interest in investigating it at the time.
I feel the exact same with the aforementioned frameworks. I too am learning Python and decided to learn it whilst hacking away with web.py. When I found myself building yet another MVC framework with web.py as its core. I moved on to Pylons as it presents a nice middle ground between web.py and Django. Its a framework with a bit more bent on web.py's spartanism. So far its been a nice journey and loving the language more and more.
And it's not really bias; I come from a generalist perspective. I worked in Python for about two years, and it's the same way as Ruby. Any library or language is going to require a lot of learning to really master. I floundered in Python until I broke down and basically read through the API reference front to back. And with regards to what's going on behind the scenes, I found Django no different than Rails. Perhaps a little more obfuscated with the way templates and the auto-admin work, but I didn't have as much interest in investigating it at the time.
But, whatever. YMMV, obviously. :)