There is a payoff in learning it. You will be amazed at how few lines of code it takes to get things done. My approach to learning a new language (I have learned many in 51 and one-half (as of today) years of programming) is to start right in trying to write some little program I want. That results in "fighting" the language for a while before I get the hang of it and start accomplishing things.

Get the Pick Axe book. I use it constantly (the PDF digital version) to look up the details of the many methods. I used its descriptions of Ruby and how to do things to get myself going. I was amazed at how often I discovered that Ruby did the right thing when I pushed the enevelope a bit and just coded what I thought should work and sure enough it did. Yes there were times when it didn't work too... The automatic variable typing took a bit of getting used to. And I had to stop trying to get it to act like Turbo Pascal where I first started doing OO programming 21 years ago.

FWIW I came to Ruby without knowing Perl, Awk, or Python. My friend who knows Perl can see the many similarities between it and Ruby. Before Ruby my language of choice for quickly accomplishing a computing objective with minimum code was REXX which originated at IBM. You already figured out that I am an old mainframe programmer. That's all there was... And only a few of them at that.

Try Ruby. You'll like it. I started doing Ruby in July of this year.