It might be a problem with your OS/distribution if you feel like it is awful to use in production. FreeBSD, for example, provides an excellent ruby version in it's package repository (and can have all of them installed, 1.8, 1.9, 2.0, rubinius, jruby, etc) and it's very easy to manage. This is true, I am sure, for many linux distributions as well, and many other OSes. I don't see how ruby can be blamed here.