Yon, I think you're going to have to support that claim about OpenACS not being a good platform to learn. Of all the platforms I've worked with, it's one platform where there is a lot less "voodoo magic" going on than on many other platforms.
I think, in general, learning how to build good db-backed web sites is tougher than most people have made it out to be. It's not as hard as, say, building an RDBMS, but it's harder than writing some HTML, too.
OpenACS is not perfect by any means, but I've found that most tools that are simpler to use than OpenACS are tools in which one builds systems that are not efficient, make poor use of the database, or later cause huge architectural problems.
But maybe you had something else in mind...
