I'm a little reluctant to add to the wasteland that is this post and these comments, but here goes.
I'm familiar with the situation here. The deal was this: Derek was not a programmer; he was a musician. He learned some PHP and cobbled together the old CDBaby site by himself. It was good.
Then, he heard about Rails, and became infatuated with it. He proceeded to attempt a rolling rewrite of CDBaby's frontend and backend both (the backend is large, because of inter-label and digital distribution stuff) in Rails.
At this time, Derek had no experience with the following things:
* any language other than PHP
* systems integration and interoperability
* Rails
* object-orientation
* the MVC pattern
* managing a development team
Project fails. All right. As he has learned in #2, legacy compatibility trumps everything. Also, ship early and often.
As you can see in Derek's post about MySQL encodings, he's not always the clearest thinker. Even above he says that REST means POST-only destruction, which misses the point entirely.
His team was fine (mostly just Jeremy, until another developer was hired in the last months). Rails was fine. But there were a lot of things wrong with the project plan ("rewrite everything, eventually") and with the project leader, who was convinced he had found a silver bullet.
No framework saves you from your own inexperience.
Out.
