If we are talking about frameworks, I believe Padrino is a much better designed framework than Rails. It doesn't have any magic of Rails and architected in a very elegant way. I just can't tolerate ActiveRecord, so Padrino having Sequel support out of the box was definitely an important step in going away from Rails. Also being built on top of Sinatra, it is also much lighter and faster than Rails, another huge reason to switch.

Yes Rails wins the popularity contest, but it doesn't mean it's the best thing for Ruby.