I&#x27;m curious to see examples of the shiny magic you&#x27;re talking about. Honestly. I can think of some conventions that seemed a little magical at first but make more sense once you understand what&#x27;s really happening under the hood.<p>Have you worked much in Rails? I&#x27;m asking, because it sounds like your exposure is mostly from demos and blog posts, which are obviously going to use the five-minute, &quot;happy meal&quot; examples. A complex, real-world application is very different from a presentation where somebody whips together a blog engine in 15 minutes. For example, I can&#x27;t remember the last time I saw somebody use the scaffold generator for production functionality, other than maybe for temporarily mocking up some functionality for stakeholder feedback.<p>I&#x27;m wondering if some of our difference in opinion is just based on Rails appearing easy to use. Take ActiveRecord for example. Sure, you don&#x27;t need to understand SQL and database engines to get started using it, but if you&#x27;re going to build anything serious, you better understand how to drop down to raw SQL when necessary, how indexing works in a RDBMS, etc. I personally think ActiveRecord, while a bit bloated, is a great mix of making the simple stuff extremely easy and getting out of my way when I need to do something more sophisticated.<p>And I think that applies to Rails overall. It makes the simple, routine stuff very easy, and it lets me do more sophisticated things with minimum complexity overhead.<p>All of that said, my opinion is based on my experiences. It sounds like you&#x27;ve seen&#x2F;had other experiences with Rails, maybe systems built by less mature developers. I&#x27;ve inherited some bad Rails systems, but I&#x27;ve inherited just-as-bad systems built in Java, .NET, PHP, Javascript, etc.