I had to solve issues with custom domains, HTTPS, gzip, separate media/static files buckets, and storages/compressor not playing nicely together in general.
I don't mean to insult the asset pipeline, it provides a lot. But it definitely doesn't save you hours. Out of the box the asset pipeline is great for all the things that come for free but if you are doing a lot of development in the framework you probably return to the asset pipeline documentation on a regular basis. And I consider time spent in documentation a negative compared to time finding your own solution if the API is not intuitive and you find yourself consistently returning to the docs about similar problems. And let me tell you, plenty of my fellow Rails devs have said to me they also regularly return to the asset pipeline docs.