Strange Error Message when project.pbxproj is not accessible

First off let me apologize for how terrible this bug report is, I've been trying (largely in vain) to get my project to compile and my system may be in an invalid state anyway so this report might be totally useless, but I figured I should at least in some way "document" what happened.

Long story short, when I went to pod update I was getting a nil class error relating to xcodeproj (why I'm reporting this here and not on the main cocoapods repo) and it wouldn't work.

I spent hours and hours trying to get it to work, including reinstalling all my gems, reinstalling ruby via brew and rvm, everything I could think of.

Turns out what had happened was that several files in my project had switched to having their owner be root and no longer being world readable/writable. One of these files was project.pbxproj in my xcodeproj. I think having that file not be accessible is what gave me a very difficult to follow error message.

So I figured I'd bring it to your attention that if that file is not accessible, the error message displayed doesn't indicate anything relating to that.

Now, why those files had their owner changed I can't even begin to speculate (random HFS+ fun?) so it's entirely possible that the reason that I got a worthless error message is due to some other way that this same problem hosed my system (I'm reinstalling everything and restoring from backups to be safe, hence why I'm not playing around to see if I can reproduce the same error).