....Is this a sign

That I should give up on Rails?

My sqlite adapter was overquoting table names, meaning existing tables were not found. This made migrations difficult. Found a solution here. To summarize:

ruby/gems/1.8/gems/activerecord-2.1.0/lib/active_record/connection_adapters/sqlite3_adapter.rb

Replace

returning structure = @connection.table_info(quote_table_name(table_name)) do

with:

returning structure = @connection.table_info(table_name) do