I love Flask for simple stuff, but I'm a little concerned that, as someone who considers himself a relatively advanced Python developer, I don't really understand quite a lot of this.

I have no doubt that if I dug into it then it would all make sense, but my first instinct is this: how much of this complexity (proxy objects to thread locals, context stacks etc) results from the fact that doing:

    from flask import request

is just a bad idea?

Perhaps things would be easier if instead of:

    from flask import request

    ...

    @app.route('/'):
    def index():
        return "Hello from %s" % request.args.get('name')

we did:

    @app.route('/'):
    def index(request):
        return "Hello from %s" % request.args.get('name')

I'm probably massively over-simplifying things, but the idea of magically importing state is the one aspect of Flask that always felt a bit odd to me.