[canistr]

Totally agreed.

I started out trying to learn and build using Django but it degenerated into exactly what the author claimed about automagic frameworks.

I switched to Flask/SqlAlchemy and was able to grasp MVC much quicker. It was more work to do some stuff, but getting a little lower than Django helped me learn what was happening in routing/views/controllers/etc. Using SqlAlchemy meant I could stick within my realm of knowledge with respect to Python without all the fancy stuff within Django.

[cushychicken]

Yes! I started tinkering around with learning web development about a year and a half ago, and started working through the Django tutorial. I had a hard time seeing where everything fit, and then I saw a post on /r/Python about Flask, did the tutorial in half an hour, and never looked back.

>getting a little lower than Django helped me learn what was happening in routing/views/controllers/etc.

Definitely. Armin nailed the degree of abstraction necessary to make MVC pretty easy while giving you some indirect insight about what's really going on.