I recently ditched rails for sinatra / padrino (mostly sinatra) due to the fact that if you want to do something off the beaten path, even in rails 3 it's a complete crap shoot of trying to tie together different pieces since it seems people only work with rails specific active_* parts - You spend more time wrestling libraries in rails 2-3 than actually doing work.
Not to take anything away from those microframeworks (they are awesome), but are you sure you're giving Rails 3 a chance?
After all, they brought the merb devs into Rails core and radically re-architected the whole framework to support modularity and customization down to a very low level. From the extraction of ActiveModel, to the inclusion of Thor for generators, the decoupling of Prototype and an ambitious attempt at unobtrustive javascript, and the declaration of a publicly support API upon which even the framework itself is built, Rails 3 the biggest overhaul Rails has ever had.
Have they succeeded in making it truly modular? I dunno, it's not released yet for one thing, but to say it's a crap shoot is a bit premature IMO.
Yes I'm also using sinatra, I love how clean and simple it is. I was trying to decide which gem to use for authentication, but couldn't find one that was simple enough (I'm fairly stupid) so I rolled my own. Sorry this is more of a ramble, I just really like sinatra, no sinatra-language to learn as in rails.
I first used rails very early on, late 2003 no... maybe it was early 2004. Anyway I didn't like it then but it did save my ass in getting my college project done.
