Nitpick: "Ruby was in its infancy" - Ruby was created in 1995, and was certainly quite usable in 2004. I think maybe you mean Rails, which was released in July of that year according to wikipedia.
Well, you had Cerise and IOWA for Ruby Web frameworks then, also Wee, though Wee was not so robust. But IOWA was quite capable of fast, scalable Web sites. For whatever reasons it never got the attention it deserved.
