I’d go so far as to say most of Rails came from “look at Java, and don’t do that” sort of approach.

Which is absolutely warranted.

In my case it was 3 weeks of work on Java redone in 3 days of Rails without even knowing Ruby yet. Hibernate could have been wonderful (I don't have fond memories of it) but AR was much much better to use.

I have a similar story. I saw the Rails book in a library and decided to give a go.

It was so easy to overtake what I was working on with Hibernate and Spring.