I actually think Ruby on Rails is the worst thing that happened to web development, because it convinced almost everyone that web development is now a solved problem and this is as far we go.
I don't know any Rails devs that think this. I constantly get the feeling when building Rails apps that there are still plenty of opportunities for making things easier and simpler.
However, none of the alternatives are any better and most are far worse, particularly the current crop of half-hearted lisp & functional approaches. I'm still open to the idea that functional languages can be used as the basis of a superior framework but nobody's come close to demonstrating that yet. Redoing Sinatra in Clojure/Scala/Lisp/Haskell isn't going to get you even close.
I think most Rails developers would agree with you there, which is why we're still seeing interesting gems that make our work easier coming out every day. There is a real commitment in the Rails community to make web development more productive and enjoyable, and I would hope that that is the attitude shared by most devs, regardless of framework.
Still, there is something very true to the original comment. Most web frameworks are wed to an overall philosophy for creating web applications. Rails is unlikely to depart from the MVC pattern for example. If you agree with that you can see that Rails, and any other framework I can think of, can at best hope to strive for a local maximum, unless their overall approaches are eventually validated as the way to do things, but I find that very unlikely.
I like the idea of web frameworks using functional languages, largely because I believe a framework written in a functional language will be better capable of adapting to new advances. I definitely agree with you about Sinatra. Even if a lisp or other FP language is better suited to the task, the advance will be evolutionary at best, while what I'd like to see is something revolutionary.
I don't know any Rails devs that think this. I constantly get the feeling when building Rails apps that there are still plenty of opportunities for making things easier and simpler.
However, none of the alternatives are any better and most are far worse, particularly the current crop of half-hearted lisp & functional approaches. I'm still open to the idea that functional languages can be used as the basis of a superior framework but nobody's come close to demonstrating that yet. Redoing Sinatra in Clojure/Scala/Lisp/Haskell isn't going to get you even close.