Geoffrey Grosenbach published a dense post about his experience at FOWA. A very interesting read, focused on the wide concept of scalability of a technology: structural, client-side (perceived), social.
About the latter:
PHP had to intentionally think about the public image of the language. [...]
Where will this come from for Rails? The author of Rails is unlikely to become a calm, diplomatic advocate in a way that non-Ruby web developers can appreciate. [...]
At one point there was something called MINASWAN, but I don’t think that is very well known inside the Rails community (not to mention outside of it).
So is there hope for the Rails PR machine? Is it possible for us to reverse the popular opinion of it as an unscalable, offensively-promoted niche framework?
Now the point here is that being over-aggressive is generally a good marketing tactic, but can actually turn into a poor strategy if weak spots (as scalability in this case) emerge… however this could be good in a sense, because it means that the product (Rails in this case) is given no choice than to fix those weak spots as soon as possible.