Great comment – it's cool when people state an opinion and then back it up with explicit things rather than hand-waving when pressed on it.

I tend to agree that you end up reading quite a lot of Rails code to figure out what's going on if you work with it long enough, but I also think it makes up for it by being pretty well structured, well documented, and generally easy to understand. It's definitely a trade-off though.

There are really two parts to ActiveRecord, which I wish were separated: the actual ActiveRecord pattern, which involves "live" objects that represent your data model and are hooked into the database (ie. the "super smart things in response to a simple command"), and the query interface, which lets you construct queries lazily and with good composability. I think the first aspect is a bit too clever and can result in surprising things happening, but I think the second aspect is pretty great. Arguably, you could just use arel, but I find that ActiveRecord's syntax is quite a noticeable improvement. But I also think something like sequel could be quite nice, though I haven't used it in production yet.