With the release of Rails 5.0, DHH has set out a doctrine to clearly define why Rails does what it does and is still relevant in 2016. There's some very good discussion in the Hacker News but I know some people here have had passing interest in the Ruby language and arguably it's most popular framework.
I worked on a product that used RoR as it's backend, and while I wouldn't start one with it now, I do respect what they've done with the language and the rails framework. Libraries like pry were a godsend and testing was easy even if not the quickest. Cool to see them put this out and make it clear what they're all about.
Codeschool was severely discounted a while back and I managed to do some of the Rails For Zombies course but found it really hard to wrap my head around the "magic" happening, then next time it was discounted I went back to finish up and it was a real struggle but things started to click. Now I've done 7 courses on Rails and Ruby including the Ruby Koans and I still don't really understand it, but I definitely appreciate what it does a lot more. Coming from a Java / PHP background I feel like Ruby is the language I'd like to learn the most, but would probably least benefit from. Maybe I should just give in and listen to my preachy Django friend?
One of the things that bothered me most about Ruby on Rails was definitely the amount of 'magic' that was going on. When something went wrong sometimes I was at a loss as to why. Personally, for the web I'm quite enjoying node.js which has just enough 'magic', though if I could use it for everything I would probably use Go.