ruby on rails any good?

Ok I can't take the hype. I have to try the infamous ruby on rails. http://www.rubyonrails.org/

I managed to pretty much avoid java after I was put off by a buggy servlet server, despite the huge amount of foaming at the mouth enthusiasm oracle inflicted on their customers to embrace it. (You can lead customers to java but you can't make them use it, especially not if you're replacing a higher level language (plsql) with a far lower one (java) :-) I managed to almost completely avoid learning php, unbelievable as that might seem. I never got anywhere near python and have completely avoided .net another thing on Oracle's radar. I've only done the barest minimum with javascript. So I definitely have sales-resistance, staying in the 80's with Perl. But all the promo over ruby is very tempting...
Unfortunately tho, where I could really use a web site overhaul is
on a hosted site that doesn't provide ruby etc. (Cheap commercial web hosts sure know how to make things difficult. If some application
is not provided/installable by fantastico or something like that you
may be SOL because you don't have a lot of leeway in what you can do to run/change things.)
Not a lot of web hosting firms are doing ruby, yet:
http://wiki.rubyonrails.com/rails/pages/RailsWebHosts
But anyway at least I can try it out on
one of my work machines as long as what I'm using it for is "in the mission" and we do have reasons to do some things via the web.
So anyone already checked this ruby stuff out? As a legacy pre-object programmer and gasp, pre-ansi C programmer, who was not swept away nor even slightly favorably impressed by the object schtick, will this newfangled view/model/controller thing
http://www.onlamp.com/pub/a/onlamp/2005/10/13/what_is_rails.html
totally overwhelm my brain or can I just hack away regardless?
In any case I'll report back as to what I find unless someone beats me to it.