One of my favorite Alan Kay quotes: "Make simple things simple, and complex things possible." And the Albert Einstein quote everyone mangles: "A scientific theorem should be as simple as possible, but not simpler." It's a matter of finding the sweet spot where the system is easy enough to learn to be accessible, and sophisticated enough to be powerful. In terms of usability, I've generally been happy with where Rails falls on that spectrum. The real challenge with Rails is learning the codebase well enough to make effective contributions to the framework.