Rails has a lot of moving parts, which is certainly daunting for the beginner, and having worked in it professionally for three or however many years it's been I have a certain cognitive bias going on here but bear with me:
What part of Rails is… monolithic? I don't understand this complaint. Rails 3 these days is pretty modular.
For the same reason I can't stand Sinatra et al; two-to-four hours into most projects I find myself saying "Oh yeah, I could really use an ORM, and some route helpers, and a view layer would be nice and how do I get this testing framework to play nice?" and before you know it you've wasted more time trying to cobble something together.
After you've done it once or twice, you will have a list of the components you prefer and that works for your style, as a starting point. I find that for my personal projects, that list is very different both in size and contents of what Rails pulls in.
Another big difference to me is coupling: In theory Rails might be modular, but because of what Rails is, while you may be free to tear out ActiveRecord for example, it takes very little before you're knee deep in dealing with shit from 3rd party code that assumes the default stack. If you can't rely on all the Rails plugins and extensions, and you want to replace a major component of Rails, then there's suddenly a lot less reason to use it at all.
What part of Rails is… monolithic? I don't understand this complaint. Rails 3 these days is pretty modular.
For the same reason I can't stand Sinatra et al; two-to-four hours into most projects I find myself saying "Oh yeah, I could really use an ORM, and some route helpers, and a view layer would be nice and how do I get this testing framework to play nice?" and before you know it you've wasted more time trying to cobble something together.