What you said in the first sentence of this reply was exactly my point - perhaps this didn't come across correctly in the post. I totally appreciate rails for h

What you said in the first sentence of this reply was exactly my point - perhaps this didn't come across correctly in the post. I totally appreciate rails for how easy it makes things, and there's a reason that I chose it and continue to work with it. The problem that I am bringing up here is exactly what you pointed out in your second paragraph - you can get away with not understanding it, which is very tempting for beginners. If your two options are (1) get off and running immediately without deep understanding or (2) take a long time to understand things before you start -- for a beginner, this is often an easy decision. But in reality, it's important down the road to know what's going on behind the scenes, so you can be cruising along not knowing how things work, then when you run into a snag that you can't figure out, everything halts while you take an extended period of time to try to figure it out.