So, I'm old, and have done lots of stuff in lots of languages in frameworks. For about a dozen years, Rails was my go-to toolkit. I've written a couple dozen production applications with it. Unfortunately, Rails has really fallen out of favor lately. Even a Rails-specialty shop I worked for briefly has pivoted to using ASP.NET. I've played around in that stack, and found it lacking. (EF just doesn't compete as an ORM.) However, they've moved on to bigger corporate customers, and those places just don't use Rails.

Recently, and because of this same we-don't-"do"-Rails sentiment, I was forced into using Java for a web application. So I prototyped a site with Spring and Angular 6, thinking this -- arguably -- represents the "state of the art" when doing a Java web app. Out of frustration, I also cranked up a prototype with Rails. What was taking me literally 160 lines of Java and JS, to build two related models and a form to edit the relationship, took me 3 lines with Rails. Nothing else I've found allows me to be as productive as Rails for writing web applications.

I can understand criticizing Ruby for being clever. There are still magic tricks you can do with it I've never even tried to understand. I can understand criticizing Rails for being obscure. I realize that it took me MANY years to be REALLY effective with it. But if you're telling me the alternative for web applications is ANYTHING related to Java, I'll call you crazy.

I've just inherited a Laravel-based PHP site, which is so old I can't download the version of the framework it uses. Yikes. I did PHP for about 10 years, 20 years ago. It doesn't feel like a lot has changed.

So, I'm honestly asking, as someone who hates Rails: What framework, out there, somewhere, allows me to be as productive as Rails, but which is are "better," somehow?