There's no black magic here. Everything you see here can be found by running the profiler and reading the docs. I haven't been a Mac developer nearly as long as he has, and almost all of these are things that I do.
Mostly, yes; but the folklore like (paraphrasing) "don't use Core Data for this particular purpose" is also critical and isn't as easy to come by except through bitter experience (or war stories from other developers, if you're a good listener).
It’s clear from the docs that CoreData can use SQLite internally but doesn’t give the programmer full access to all the features of the database. No bitter experience necessary.
The bitter experience is needed to learn that there are no shortcuts, and that the higher-level library that makes everything easy for you will also bite you in the ass sooner or later. We aren't born knowing these things, sadly.
There are no true shortcuts.