[rvdavis]

I agree with this wholeheartedly. When I first started learning Rails, I found that a lot of the automagical stuff hindered my understanding of how Rails actually worked. After building a few projects in Sinatra, it was easier to see how much of the heavy lifting Rails does for you behind the scenes.

[Raellan]

Yes! I'd argue that the same can be said for Django for those either currently using or exploring the use of the heavyweight Python web framework. Take a look at Flask and build your understanding from the ground up. Anyway, at the end of the day they all have their place and IRT the Op's question: It never hurts to gain an understanding of another language/framework. There's so many amazing projects across the entire landscape that it never hurts to have even a cursory familiarity (e.g. breadth and depth being complementary).

[bigmanwalter]

And for anyone going down this path with Python, I recommend taking a look at web2py after Flask.

web2py is where I finally settled after trying Django and Flask first. It's got more magic in it than Django, and yet, I found Django felt heavier and more "over-engineered". Flask, on the other hand, is very elegant, but as soon as you start patching together a few different libraries, the cognitive load of needing to understand Flask, WTForms and SQLAlchemy was too much for me.

web2py has most of the features of Django, but is written by only 1 person so the API is much more consistent than a Flask-based smorgasbord. It took me a small fraction of the time to get up to speed on the web2py documentation than it did for me to figure out the Django and Flask ecosystems :) I recommend it whole heartily!