It was transformative, it just wasn't for you. It made me enjoy building websites significantly more than doing them with PHP and HTML did, and whilst there's always been other options none of them were as simple to get running as Rails.
I'm probably not the only one who found it transformative, you're probably not the only one who didn't, and that's fine. A piece of technology doesn't have to be useful to everyone to be transformative.
Very true. Transformative my ass. I was already pretty efficient at building websites without rails.