Well Rails Conf ended up being a very satisfying experience.  I was very impressed at how well the conference organizers took care of the problems that cropped up.  I also found the "intensity level" of the attendees went down each day we were there.  That made it easier to interact with people and find out more about what folks were up to.  Props to Chad Fowler who I'm sure put way too much of his precious time into organizing this thing.

If you never have been to Rails Conf, I would definitely recommend going.  You will get more out of the experience if you are a beginner to intermediate Rails developer.  I'm really more of an intermediate Rails developer (even though I am a very experienced developer in other languages and frameworks) so I learned a lot.  Even the experienced guys I talked to seemed to feel that they learned at least one new thing at every talk they went to.  I would also recommend the conference If you are interested in a full time job doing Ruby on Rails.  There were tons of people there doing recruiting. 

Overall I was impressed with the quality of the presentations.  The presentations were polished and most of the speakers had a very engaging speaking style.  The presenters were also extremely knowledgeable about their topics.  The presentation times were typically 55 minutes so they were long enough to cover some interesting ground but not so long that they became excruciating.  Most presenters used the entire time and took only one or two questions.  You could always ask them your question if you bumped into them at lunch or whatever.  Another nice touch was that all of the slides are now available on the conference website (100% necessary since they tend to breeze through them quite quickly.)