Yeah of course it's harder, because it's built on top of a platform you don't understand. It's easier to make good design decisions in Python if you come from a background rich with C experience, right? Because you understand what's going on under the hood. Without that experience -- like me -- you just fumble around like a big stupid klutz until you realize one day that you need to learn the lower level stuff.

So naturally when you're talking about dealing with an abstraction layer built on another abstraction layer it's going to be even hard to understand. That's why I say don't learn the framework. Learn the language, the concepts, the principles. It will make understanding the complexities easier to untangle.