mainly because of rails magic though whenever I look at it. Convention over configuration hurts my brain some days.

I agree. Ruby has waaaay too much magic which makes it impossible to follow (dynamic typing makes it even worse).

And convention over configuration definitely has huge advantages in terms of consistency and terseness, but it is also way less discoverable because instead of a config file say "the stuff is in foo" you have to already know that everything in foo is automatically treated as stuff.

I often wonder if it would be crazy to have both: you have a configuration file that says where things go, but the values must be set to constant well-known values. Sounds kind of crazy so I've never done it but you would get consistency and discoverability. I expect people would complain about the redundancy though.