I am the profile this article talks about, and I can assure you Rails is perfect for beginners. Sinatra confuses the hell out of me, admittedly and I think the key - less and less so every day.

I also taught, being a total noob myself, my best friend how to code Rails in 2 months. He doesn't even know HTML, or how to make/compile something. But he can code Ruby/Rails. And I mean Ruby, not just plug together a scaffolded app.

So yeah, I'm not so sure I agree with this.