I'd say your argument was convincing, but you forgot that Ruby's language design is full of sharp edges where features were forced together in poorly thought out ways. For example, I yesterday learned that you can't determine the order of invocation when chaining super through multiple mixins that override the same method of a class. It's as though the designers thought that saying "we don't do multiple inheritance, just mixins" relieved them of actually having to define their semantics properly.

So it's not that your reasoning was wrong. It's that your conclusion was. The right conclusion was, "What the hell were those amateurs thinking? That's idiotic!"

I'm going to go fondle my ALGOL 60 report now...