Knowing that, maybe I can go a little easier on myself when I fail to live up to the ideals, and simply keep on striving without having to feel that I am obviously an inferior coder.
Somehow, I (somebody with zero Ruby experience, and very little web dev experience) had ended up with the same impression. That certainly is some good evangelism.
I continued to be amazed and nonplussed that a community could do so well and know so many technologies so fluently when I took so long to learn them.
And now that I've met a bunch of Rails people in person and am considered a Rails guru by two consecutive companies, I'll tell you that yeah, it's mostly hype.
Not that Rails is bad -- it rocks. But it requires a lot of background in deep, messy Ruby to really do well, and there's a lot of bad Ruby and Rails code out there. How could it be otherwise?
When I started using PHP ten years ago, I inherited an existing project. Two days into it I thought to myself: "PHP is kind of like Perl, but less useful." I guess I missed the PHP hype phase. If it had one.
I've never been a language evangelist. I just solve problems with whatever technology is most appropriate for the case.
My own projects generally lack extensive testing (and the code lacks complex code paths) but I refactor heavily.