Rails, in 2007, was a tall glass of cold water. Coming from a world of spaghetti-coded PHP scripts (if you were lucky—ColdFusion, Java, or ASP if you weren't) it seemed to be the right framework at the right time: the router took away the jumble of scripts that hard-coded our app endpoints, the "MVC" structure and naming conventions fit all of our code into nice, individually labeled bins, and ActiveRecord single-handedly eliminated 99% of the reams of hand-coded, error-prone, wildly insecure SQL that littered our codebases.
In time, though, it's become more and more clear that Rails was simply a framework at the right time. Rails didn't impose a new object-oriented structure on our previously formless apps... it simply imposed a new Railsy structure, and obscured the difference with a language change. If a block of code went at the top of a PHP file, that same chunk of code, transmogrified, got stuck into the controller, by default, because that was the first point o