This seemed a little odd to me as well, but mostly because I haven't been a noob for a long time and so am out of touch with that feeling of "this is hard" when it comes to installing rails.
I don't think that installing rails got any harder relative to where it was in the 1.0 days. vanilla rails locked to one version with globally-installed gems is just as easy as it ever was, so I don't know if its quite fair to say step one is "make rails hard"; the current state of the ruby world is a lot more enterprise-ready and that comes at a complexity cost and automating that away is inconvenient.
I don't think that installing rails got any harder relative to where it was in the 1.0 days. vanilla rails locked to one version with globally-installed gems is just as easy as it ever was, so I don't know if its quite fair to say step one is "make rails hard"; the current state of the ruby world is a lot more enterprise-ready and that comes at a complexity cost and automating that away is inconvenient.