I think this is very much true, but actually I disagree with you when it comes to OSS. For example, Django makes heavy use of metaclasses in order to simplify its API, and I think that's fine, because no junior developer realistically needs to contribute to such a project. They can work on a project which uses Django without needing to understand the internals.
Having said that, I was only introduced to SQLAlchemy a couple of years ago, when already pretty competent at Python. Their filter syntax (ab)uses __eq__ to allow you to write expressions such as `MyModel.my_field == 'query'` which return an expression which can be evaluated dynamically when applied to a SQL query. I did a double take when first looking at this, assuming it at first to be a typo. I then ended up digging into the internals of SQLAlchemy to find out how it all fits together. The upshot was that I explored the SQLA API in great detail. The downside is I spent a few hours doing it :D
I think this is very much true, but actually I disagree with you when it comes to OSS. For example, Django makes heavy use of metaclasses in order to simplify its API, and I think that's fine, because no junior developer realistically needs to contribute to such a project. They can work on a project which uses Django without needing to understand the internals.
Having said that, I was only introduced to SQLAlchemy a couple of years ago, when already pretty competent at Python. Their filter syntax (ab)uses __eq__ to allow you to write expressions such as `MyModel.my_field == 'query'` which return an expression which can be evaluated dynamically when applied to a SQL query. I did a double take when first looking at this, assuming it at first to be a typo. I then ended up digging into the internals of SQLAlchemy to find out how it all fits together. The upshot was that I explored the SQLA API in great detail. The downside is I spent a few hours doing it :D