IMHO, the pain of being handed code is related to its "magic". The more magic, clever, interesting contortions that are present, the less likely you are to get

IMHO, the pain of being handed code is related to its "magic". The more magic, clever, interesting contortions that are present, the less likely you are to get grips on it in any sensible time. Ruby & Rails give lots of tools to create insanely hard to unwind stacks, but I am not sure they are worse than Django & Python (custom loader [importer], decorators everywhere)... The real bitter pill is that these systems are created with the best of intentions, to make them more maintainable, more DRY, more configurable, more portable... but they generally miss the mark and cause pain for all involved.