[chowned]

The point is to rely on the abstractions. :) I get similar feelings, especially having been burned by software in the past that purported to abstract things properly. But perhaps unlike other frameworks/libraries, I think Rails has solid abstractions. Of course they're not perfect, but much like abstractions provided by an OS, they are complex, and you mostly don't have to worry about implementation details. (And when you do, that's okay, because the documentation is solid too and the code is available.)

I've been working with Django lately and I definitely had to learn to let go and trust stuff like the ORM. But after watching migrations get handled automatically and easily adding foreign key relationships to tables, I was hooked. I used to be firmly in the "almost never ORM" camp, but that's changed.