Ruby on Rails is a fantastic technology and, from what I've seen, it really does make creating Web apps much faster. However, that being said, I've been hearing more and more that one of the strongest strengths of Rails is not the code, but the evangalism. Whether or not that is really true is not something I can say, but you'll find some pointed comments about the RoR developer's database knowledge in this thread.

Also, if you sign up for the Catalyst mailing list, you can peruse a recent thread I started about this topic. The people have many interesting things to say about each solution. The (rough) consensus seemed to be that Rails is easier to use, harder to customize. Catalyst is the reverse. Which matters more to you will depend upon your needs.

There were also assertions that Catalyst is faster and more scalable and the only objection I heard was "yes, but Ruby 2.0 is just around the corner!" Needless to say, waiting for an upgrade of the underlying language is not a good option. Catalyst also has much poorer documentation and that's usually a huge obstacle to overcome.