I couldn't agree more. The pipe dream is that you have BAs or other non-technical team members write the Gherkin specs and that saves the developers time because "the tests practically write themselves!" (Assuming you're maintaing your giant library of awkward cucumber regex matchers...). In reality it takes much longer to sit down with someone and teach them how to write in Gherkin, all for the goal of having a human readable spec that doubles as test steps. It's much better if they write the specs however they want, in normal english, then you can translate those into normal rspec or test unit tests.

It's a laudable goal, but the abstraction is so leaky in reality it just ends up creating more work for everyone.