Maybe he just doesn't like chunks in his bacon.

I think two of these are valid points, except I'm not sure what idiosyncrasies you mean, or what the rails dogmas are. If you are a lisp person, I can understand why the syntax irks you.

I think a strong criticism is (was) a lack of strong typing. These days editors can read your type annotations. They aren't as awesome as python typing, though.

My time in the Ruby Community taught me about test driven development and a reliance on process that produced functioning and robust software. Things like continuous integration and careful specification through tests were promoted. If anything my most common problem with Ruby Community was too many different test suites to pick from. It seemed like there was a new one every week.

That said it was an non-typechecked interpreted scripting language and updates between versions could break things but if you had a process and a test suite those weren't practical issues.

What are some possible reasons that are experiencing the community differed so wildly?

A solo dev friend of mine is about to sign a 150k usd/year deal for his software written in JRuby. Initially installed on dozens of computers, it is to be run for months and years without intervention. So apparently there are ehhs and iffs and butts to all the off-hand dismissals. Maybe you have an elk here or there that would agree.