I've been desperately trying to understand the rationale behind Django and Django REST Framework.

I'd love some pointers to help me see the big picture.

I've read enough of the docs to be able to work with it somewhat. But every once in a while, I come across some problem.

And the only way I get out of that problem is by googling it, and finding something like this on Stack Overflow (or equiv.): "If you're facing <blah>, and you're doing <blah>, you have to create a class inheriting from GenericListAPIViewSet (or some other <blah>) and override method <blah> to do <blah>"

And these recipes work, but I never understand why I needed to do that.

I used yada to build a webapp and never faced any such problems. There were points where I didn't know/understand some stuff, but all I needed to do was read some docs and I was done.

Building with Django always feels like I'm weaving some monster using already complected concretions instead of composing impls of some well-reasoned abstractions.

Sorry for bloat.