Cucumber provides a high level language abstraction that we've never really utilized for its intended purpose of collaboration,[1] and many times the natural language simply adds an unnecessary layer of indirection.[2] The obtuseness of Cucumber's unidiomatic step definition framework also tends to lead to confusion and, I believe, misattribution of the difficulties of writing browser tests to Ruby itself.[3]
I'd like to explore using a lightweight and more idiomatic runner (probably just bare RSpec) to facilitate tests that are "flatter" (implementation alongside description) and therefore likely easier to implement and reason about. MW-Selenium 1.x was heavily refactored to be as modular and runner agnostic as possible. It shouldn't be much work to decoupling any remaining bits and implement a RSpec based harness.
At the very least, I think this exercise will help to validate whether it's Ruby or Cucumber that is the biggest barrier to entry (or possibly PageObject, Watir, etc.).
[1] https://cucumber.io/blog/2014/03/03/the-worlds-most-misunderstood-collaboration-tool
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7543994
[3] https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/mobile-l/2015-March/008869.html