Correct. The problem isn't the difficulty, it's the education.
In my own project (SproutCore), we've used Ruby-based buildtools since 2007, and there is unanimous support to move to Node, precisely because running a modern Ruby stack requires so much education.
We want to spend time in our IRC channel on SproutCore itself, not Ruby and it's myriad problems (all of which have "fixes" that "aren't so hard").
We're also moving to Node because the performance of the Ruby tools sucks, despite three rewrites (one by a member of the Rails core team, so not Ruby n00bs).
The Node tooling? It's so fast that we can literally rebuild the entire project from scratch every time we reload the app and still load everything into the browser in under a second. Oh, and it took about a day to write. :/
That, to me, is why Node is taking off. The "I can get shit done quickly" factor is very high, the resulting code runs very fast, and the community is large, energetic, and helpful. Plus, pretty much everyone has to use JavaScript today.
> precisely because running a modern Ruby stack requires so much education
Education about what? Can you give some specifics here? I'm genuinely curious as my day-to-day ruby development is pretty smooth and I haven't been doing it very long.
or if that's too much use --binstubs to use "bin/rake balls" or if you are really, utterly crazy, use --binstubs AND set $PATH to contain './bin' and then use "rake balls".
You can also use rvm with gemsets and just not use bundle exec at all. I'm amazed how quickly people forget about the things that bundler tries to fix. If you don't have any conflicts across your gems, you can basically use bundler as "just install my gems".