I'm sorry, but POW sucks

I have been (trying to) use Pow, and the Powder gem, for a few weeks now. At the outset it looked good: you get a local domain for you test on, you don't have to worry about deployments, etc etc.
But it sucks.
If you get an error in rendering (and we are using this in development, so of course this is going to happen) pow goes into a tail spin and on my MacPro it takes almost a minute to come out of it as it retries the request dozens of times.

So you end up with a huge log that looks pretty much like this:

  SQL (2.2ms)  SHOW TABLES
  SQL (1.2ms)  SHOW TABLES
  SQL (0.9ms)  SHOW TABLES
  SQL (1.2ms)  SHOW TABLES
  SQL (0.9ms)  SHOW TABLES
  SQL (1.2ms)  SHOW TABLES
  SQL (1.2ms)  SHOW TABLES
  SQL (1.2ms)  SHOW TABLES
  SQL (1.0ms)  SHOW TABLES
  SQL (1.3ms)  SHOW TABLES
  SQL (0.9ms)  SHOW TABLES
  SQL (1.2ms)  SHOW TABLES
  SQL (0.9ms)  SHOW TABLES
  SQL (1.4ms)  SHOW TABLES
  SQL (1.2ms)  SHOW TABLES
  SQL (1.4ms)  SHOW TABLES
  SQL (1.1ms)  SHOW TABLES
Rendered /Users/smyp/.rvm/gems/ree-1.8.7-2011.03@toygaroo_r3/gems/actionpack-3.0.3/lib/action_dispatch/middleware/templates/rescues/_request_and_response.erb (8663.2ms)
Rendered /Users/smyp/.rvm/gems/ree-1.8.7-2011.03@toygaroo_r3/gems/actionpack-3.0.3/lib/action_dispatch/middleware/templates/rescues/_request_and_response.erb (8728.0ms)
Rendered /Users/smyp/.rvm/gems/ree-1.8.7-2011.03@toygaroo_r3/gems/actionpack-3.0.3/lib/action_dispatch/middleware/templates/rescues/template_error.erb within rescues/layout (22759.6ms)
Rendered /Users/smyp/.rvm/gems/ree-1.8.7-2011.03@toygaroo_r3/gems/actionpack-3.0.3/lib/action_dispatch/middleware/templates/rescues/template_error.erb within rescues/layout (22758.7ms

I am going back to using Passenger standalone. Ok, you loose the pretty local domain, but it works much more reliably.