A common issue with large projects is that the Cucumber features take a lot of time to write.
So there are a number of strategies involved:
If you are using Cucumber to describe a legacy system, you get decent acceptance test coverage via cucumber and capybara, and then refactor your cucumber step definitions.
If you are unit testing properly, use Cucumber to only describe the happy path of your app, or only essential non-happy paths. Get coverage with RSpec (or Xunit of choice).
The key issues with Cucumber is that the features should be describing functionality at a very high level. You need to make your step definitions DRY and reusable, and I am a fan of redirecting step definitions to keep the stakeholder-interesting features concise and to the point. Though I think that point can be a bit contentious.
