I can look at most of the code in a Django project and imagine a basic implementation sitting behind it. And I can work off of those generalizations. I can't do that for Rails.
That's the point about DSLs and Magic -- you have no idea what could be going on behind the scenes, and it's harder to make a guess about why it might be going wrong.
At the risk of sounding harsh, it sounds like maybe you and the OP are just not interested in bucking down and learning more about the language. I tried to learn "Rails" by itself, but decided that learning Ruby (and I mean all of it, not just learning how to write an if statement) is the only way to really be able to use Rails. I can now (a) understand what's going on and (b) !!bonus!! I can write better code in Rails because I can bend Ruby to my will.
And it's not really bias; I come from a generalist perspective. I worked in Python for about two years, and it's the same way as Ruby. Any library or language is going to require a lot of learning to really master. I floundered in Python until I broke down and basically read through the API reference front to back. And with regards to what's going on behind the scenes, I found Django no different than Rails. Perhaps a little more obfuscated with the way templates and the auto-admin work, but I didn't have as much interest in investigating it at the time.
I feel the exact same with the aforementioned frameworks. I too am learning Python and decided to learn it whilst hacking away with web.py. When I found myself building yet another MVC framework with web.py as its core. I moved on to Pylons as it presents a nice middle ground between web.py and Django. Its a framework with a bit more bent on web.py's spartanism. So far its been a nice journey and loving the language more and more.
I can look at most of the code in a Django project and imagine a basic implementation sitting behind it. And I can work off of those generalizations. I can't do that for Rails.
That's the point about DSLs and Magic -- you have no idea what could be going on behind the scenes, and it's harder to make a guess about why it might be going wrong.