I've learned to happily repeat code if it means making my programs/components more stateless, more decoupled or simpler to understand. There's nothing worse than trying to make sense of code where a programmer tried to shoehorn two similar but ultimately different concerns through the same code paths.
I'll also happily add complexity if it means reducing coupling and state and add coupling if it means being stateless. State is the ultimate enemy that makes code inflexible and buggy, especially when it's mutable state.
Two components are hardly coupled just because they happen to use the same library.
If your "configuration" is powerful enough to do everything you need then it's Turing-complete and is just "code" by another name. If it's not powerful enough then you'll need to drop down into the code layer pretty frequently anyway.
Create a component, then tell the framework how to instantiate it, then tell the framework to instantiate one and give it a name, then pass that name into anything that needs one.... blech.
The reasons you invent things to get rid of the crap work is so that you can do the work you really want to do. In my experience, people replace one pile of work with another and call it progress.
Only the rare few will automate the things they should, and truly live the freedom they have.
Somehow the right amount of configuration seems to save a lot of work as compared to conventions that fall just short of actual need.
I think there's a trap, though, that leads to the 'convention over configuration' one-size-fits-all road, and it's things that require loads of annoying, hard to manage, poorly structured configuration. (Things, like, for example, Apache, IMO.)
Though perhaps I'm just not good at determining when to write my own generators and when not to, I've also had Rails applications where I wrote a generic controller that covered a dozen-plus models and wondered why there couldn't have just been a generic controller built in to begin with (it's not like it'd preclude bumping things out of generic into their own controller if necessary).
I kind of wonder, too, if the evolution towards things like Docker/CoreOS with stuff like etcd from more traditional Linux distros and virtualization might also be viewable as a trend from convention towards a 'right amount' of configuration.
Just some off the cuff thoughts.
