Thank God someone with a bullhorn finally said this. I was beginning to think I was alone in my hatred of Cucumber. (And my love of Test:Unit/Minitest.)
When I saw the whole "looks like English!" thing I skipped it without a second thought. That's just a bad idea because you're going to piss people off when it turns out that it's really nothing at all like English, and you're also going to irritate the people who wonder why Ruby constructs don't work either.
I really wish the Rails community would get over its crush on both RSpec and Cucumber. The whole point of Rails in the first place was to cast off all the ceremony and drudgery of web development in Java yet we've replaced it with these unnecessarily cryptic and complex tools just for the sake of some syntactic cuteness.
I'm so tired of reading Rails job postings hammering down RSpec and usually also Cucumber experience as a prerequisite.
I'm in the same boat as you, but I don't tend to voice my opinions on Test::Unit because there is such a strong opinion for RSpec and Cucumber. IMHO, I tend to like my tools to be tried and true, and not do any fancy magic.
Learned my lesson the hard way(s) with Rspec and Cucumber a while ago - total waste of my time.
There's a group of devs that have fooled themselves into thinking anyone outside their group understands how they are testing. I've seen this firsthand. DHH has always been right, imo, in this regard; test what you think is important, use simple tools.
TestUnit still serves me well and it perfectly fits my needs of do more with less.
I used Test::Unit for a long time, but I found it to be a poor tool when doing integration tests. RSpec lets me do both within the same DSL quite easily. That's probably why a lot of people flock to RSpec. I still have old Test::Unit code sitting in my RSpec suite that I haven't moved over to RSpec's DSL.
That being said, to a developer writing tests and doing TDD, Cucumber is a speed bump that doesn't need to be there. RSpec is great without lumping more crap on top of it.
Thank God someone with a bullhorn finally said this. I was beginning to think I was alone in my hatred of Cucumber. (And my love of Test:Unit/Minitest.)