I'm curious to see examples of the shiny magic you're talking about. Honestly. I can think of some conventions that seemed a little magical at first but make mo

I'm curious to see examples of the shiny magic you'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's really happening under the hood. Have you worked much in Rails? I'm asking, because it sounds like your exposure is mostly from demos and blog posts, which are obviously going to use the five-minute, "happy meal" 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'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. I'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't need to understand SQL and database engines to get started using it, but if you'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. 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. All of that said, my opinion is based on my experiences. It sounds like you've seen/had other experiences with Rails, maybe systems built by less mature developers. I've inherited some bad Rails systems, but I've inherited just-as-bad systems built in Java, .NET, PHP, Javascript, etc.