Greg,
I for one am glad you posted about your app. I'd love to hear more
about it, and in particular any changes you guys had to make to RoR, or
any extensions, etc. Especially if you can't release any source, I'd be
interested in hearing what you guys did just the same. I'm both shocked
and embarrassed by the bad attitude from the other list members. I can
never figure out why people find so much pleasure in bashing others. I
bet they wouldn't say it to your face. 
Good luck.
Cheers, John
} I for one am glad you posted about your app. I'd love to hear more
} about it, and in particular any changes you guys had to make to RoR, or
} any extensions, etc. Especially if you can't release any source, I'd be
} interested in hearing what you guys did just the same. I'm both shocked
} and embarrassed by the bad attitude from the other list members. I can
} never figure out why people find so much pleasure in bashing others. I
} bet they wouldn't say it to your face. Good luck.
A friend of mine saw my recent posts about the site and asked me a couple of questions privately, and it made me recognize the biggest lesson we've learned: there is nothing sacrosanct about Rails conventions.
It's been said over and over that Rails is "opinionated software," but what that really means isn't always clear. The opinions in question are (largely) those held by DHH. It is appropriate to refer to them as opinions because they are not backed by the confidence brought by solid research (e.g. case studies) but by the accumulated experiences of a group of developers. I'm not so arrogant as to say that DHH's opinions are wrong, but I will say that I disagree with him on a number of points. So do a lot of the folks working here.
Disagreeing with opinions that form the basis of the choices made in Rails does not mean that Rails is of no use to us. When we find ourselves with a choice between following a Rails convention that seems to conflict with where we are trying to go and working/patching around it, we look at the cost of being nonstandard and supporting something ourselves vs. the cost of contorting our code to stay within the conventions. Sometimes we've determined that it made more sense to keep to the conventions, and sometimes we've monkey patched or otherwise changed Rails' default behavior.
What I'm saying is that while the Rails framework is a good starting point, it should be treated just a little bit like scaffolding. At some point you have to take responsibility for the whole codebase, not just the part you wrote.
} Cheers, } John --Greg