Yup. For a lot of models I preferred the graph mode. It was explicit with no magic. I think they should've just stuck with that, even if it meant not everyone and their mom can use it.

Agree on the framework stuff. Please just be a library, not a collection of opinionated frameworks where I need to read the source code anyway to understand what it actually does. After something not working and debugging for hours I remember looking at the number of weights in the model and thinking, wait, something can't be right here. Then I dig into the framework layers and figured out it added slightly different things than I thought it would. Would've been much faster to just write the graph myself.