by any means, the code stinks and it's got lots of ugly bugs hard to fix --
I'm not against a rewrite or something, I'm against a rewrite in ruby.
You apparently believe that having gotten an improved version for free, you are entitled to ask the volunteer to dump his work and restart to your specification — but still for free. This is not an option you in fact have. If you can't stand the improved Ruby rewrite, feel free to use the old version, or to use no version, or to do your own rewrite in Python.