I'd have thought that viewing the details of a model instance (attributes and some relationships) would be very generic use case? But I probably just don't understand how to do this easily with flask-admin as it is. Is there a good place in the documentation/examples to start looking?

I think the generic idea is to merge 'update/view' into the same thing so that you "view" by looking at the "update" form without updating anything. I've seen this in several places, though I'm not partial to the idea. I like having a separation between 'I am making changes' and 'I am viewing' just so that you don't end up with accidental updates.

Right yeah, that explains things. I don't mind this when it's just for myself, but actual users definitely get scared when they see the editable fields and the submit buttons...