Ruby on Rails?

Why do people use Ruby on Rails? It's slow, ugly and has minimal support across web hosts. Suddenly, a lot of people I know are beginning to use it and I can't get straight answers from them as to why. One of my friends who uses it says he believes it's popular with Mac users because Ruby comes preinstalled on OSX, but so does Perl and Python. I asked another friend and he said "because it can serve dynamic web pages." At this point I just gave up and dismissed my friends for idiots who don't know shit about programming, so now I'm asking you, fellow /prog/riders: why do people who know how to program and know the alternatives use that shitty ass Ruby on Rails?