Rich and Nathan are really leading the thinking in this area; they are doing great stuff. But you're completely right that it is currently much easier to throw together a side-effect-ful system with frameworks like Rails. That's not surprising: the RDBMS way of thinking has been with us for a long time, and so the tooling and people's understanding of the model has become very good.
The challenge for any new architecture is to create frameworks and tools that are even better (easier to understand and learn, more efficient to work with, easier to maintain, etc) than what is already out there. That's what will determine their adoption, and that's a good thing: we all want good tools to work with, so the bar should be high.
The challenge for any new architecture is to create frameworks and tools that are even better (easier to understand and learn, more efficient to work with, easier to maintain, etc) than what is already out there. That's what will determine their adoption, and that's a good thing: we all want good tools to work with, so the bar should be high.