... it's still not the difficult bits it makes quicker, just the boring bits, surely?

That doesn't seem an entirely bad idea to me. I'd rather spend my time doing difficult stuff than boring stuff!

I've been redoing our organizational intranet - previously built with a mish mash of perl, php and static html - using rails, and my overall impression is that it is very nice.

Plus of all the languages that I've checked out, ruby seems to have picked up the expressive power of perl, and made object orientation (and closures) a lot more intuitive.