The creator of Ruby on Rails, David Heinemeier Hansson, realized that the success of the framework was not due to his attempts to convince others, but rather by showcasing its capabilities and letting others decide for themselves. He now believes in respecting the various preferences of programmers and encouraging them to find the language that best suits their individual style and needs.

Async programming can make Ruby on Rails apps faster by delaying non-essential tasks and parallelizing I/O-bound operations. This can be achieved using methods like `deliver_later` for emails, `load_async` for database queries, and `dependent: :destroy_async` for dependent associations. However, while async can speed up apps, it can also add complexity, so it's better to address basic performance issues first and use async judiciously.