Agreed. Unfortunately I think it's becoming more difficult for beginners to get up and running with Rails. Perhaps that's how a community evolves... or perhaps I'm no longer the target audience ;)
Yeah, they monitor your repo during the competition. You're only allowed to create paper assets before the competition begins. You can see our paper mock (for smacksale.com) by clicking the robot in the footer or here http://smacksale.com/images/sketch.jpg