I found the magic just got in my way when I first got into ASP.NET MVC. I needed to use Firebird with Entity Framework but I didn't want to use that horrible feature which connects to the database and maps it automatically for you using a GUI. Mapping my model to the database is just something I'd rather do manually, and eventually I figured out how to do it and it's awesome.

I don't use membership so it doesn't infect my db.