Fair enough, I would say that the internals of ActiveRecord/Arel/etc can be complicated but also do a lot of work. I watched a number of presentations by tenderlove and had a bit of background/interest in that area to start with. "Go watch this guy's videos about relational algebra and SQL generation" is probably not what you want to hear when there's a bug though.

By the time you've gotten there though you've certainly more than figured out how method_missing and different filename based conventions work though, you've seen what Rails is and I'd be curious to find out what you like better!