A lot of the development process consists of adding fields with particular names to classes that have a long inheritance chain of their own, and it's not trivial at all to understand what all of your options are and how they work behind the scenes.
Hm I figured Django may be guilty of that. FWIW I learned web apps on RoR but my first job was Django. Django (or at least, apps in practice) was definitely less magic than Rails, although I see what you mean about a lot of the config being less transparent than one might like. I always have to eg hit SO to figure out how to add something to the admin since the model for how it works is not transparent.
I’ll definitely check out Tornado and the others for how they compare.