I don't think Rails never was about been quick to learn. It was about being easy to use (once you had bothered to learn to use it, or at least the basics). I don't think that has changed.
I also use Steak in my everyday job and I think Steak is more an idea than a library. The idea of doing acceptance testing without extra layers such as Cucumber, and some little convenience tools for the job (those aliases you refer, a couple generators and rake tasks, and a common reference for the community on how to do it). I remember @cavalle pointing in Twitter something like "Steak is a gem but it could be a gist".
So using this definition, you're still kind of using Steak =;-) (and actually is what made you do that step).
I think it provides that value, but you can cook it on your own because as you point is not difficult at all.
The contest's purpose is not to replace real open data with scraping bad HTML, but to show people what kind of things would be possible if government freed the data. The projects are just examples but not full featured, because the scraping approach has obvious limitations. In our case, all data is scraped from the INE website (http://www.ine.es/), but there's one single data which couldn't be obtained from any official source in a programmatical way, one that is essential: the mapping between official districts number and the district name. We had to type that data (http://github.com/valakirka/monquartier/blob/master/config/d...) and that's the only reason of the small scope. If we had had normalized and public data, our app would include the data for all cities, towns and villages in Spain, and not only at the district level but also at the neighbourhood level, which would make it a lot more interesting (and that's what we wanted to make clear to the people).
Great action! Congrats to the organization and all the teams! They all have special merits since the state of the public data in Spain is just awful. One may think of crushing raw data but it's more like scraping really crappy websites. I hope there's some noise with this action and open data really starts in Spain.