I went all in many years ago and then moved on several years ago (to different parts of the stack that I found more interesting), but here's my 2c FWIW. The Ra

I went all in many years ago and then moved on several years ago (to different parts of the stack that I found more interesting), but here's my 2c FWIW. The Rails Guides [1] are quite good (and much better than the API docs, even for the same topics). The "Getting Started" guide, in particular, was my first intro to Rails, and it's what convinced me to go all in — I built my entire prototype by just following along the guide, seeing what they were doing with their toy app, and then trying to whatever similar thing I needed in my app. Coming from Python, the magic was distasteful to me, too. Rails adds a ton more magic on top — so, eventually, when I set aside Rails and just spent time with Ruby (writing scripts or what not), I realized I loved Ruby the language much more than Rails the framework (and all its baggage). Stripping Rails down to its API-only mode (though it was a bit rough around the edges last I tried) got me closer to the Ruby of it all. Sinatra turned out to be a delightful little framework (though sadly I never got a chance to use it much). And, even though I've now moved on from Rails, I still like Ruby as a go-to scripting language — it makes it fun and easy to throw together a quick shell script or some data analysis, and it's very friendly to a functional programming style. I guess what I'm saying is: You're not alone. Many people in the Rails community agree that there's a ton of hidden magic, sometimes too much [2]. But underneath it all is a delightful programming language. [1]: https://guides.rubyonrails.org/ https://guides.rubyonrails.org/ [2]: The docs for the Rails routing layer, Journey, are my favorite example of this: https://github.com/rails/journey#label-SYNOPSIS-3A https://github.com/rails/journey#label-SYNOPSIS-3A