I think a lot of that is in the presentation of the tutorials and the documentation. There's a book on Oreilly called "Lightweight Django" that strips away all of the absolute non-essential cruft of Django and starts from scratch, slowly adding pieces from the framework as it goes along. It shows you why you need each piece and why it goes where it goes.
Django doesn't need the magic, it's just annoyingly presented that way.
Django doesn't need the magic, it's just annoyingly presented that way.