I've been using rails a bit over the past month, month and half and just now getting a little comfortable with it. I still slightly prefer PHP because even though it comes out ugly and takes more work, I atleast know what every single line of code is doing. Rails has a lot of "magic" which makes things easier but at the same time hides a lot of things from a developer.
Sometimes people can become overly fixated on what's hidden from them. You say you prefer PHP, but when was the last time you looked at the source code for any of the myriad extensions? Can you explain how mod_php works within apache?
Whilst I do think that it's good to have a broad view of how things fit together, knowing what every line of code is doing says to me that you are either working on incredibly trivial code, and/or you're not using existing, well-tested libraries as much as you could be.
