Mostly, yes. "return" isn't the cause, though. Just a sign that the language's primary concern is the side-effect of running statements, not their values (in which case, having a result value would be expected, not a special case). A sign of different priorities in the language design: functional-by-default or imperative-by-default.
The begin block is how one indicates "do this, ignore its value (just do it for its side-effect), then do that and return its value" in Scheme. Some forms have implicit begins, however.
I may just be repeating myself, but I hope phrasing it slightly differently helped. What made it clear to me was learning Scheme and (especially) OCaml, then going back to Python and programming in a functional/expression-oriented style, seeing the subtle ways in which the design of the language resists it. Lua is more friendly to functional programming than Python (it has tail-call optimization, for starters), but those explicit returns still show it isn't a perfect fit.
The begin block is how one indicates "do this, ignore its value (just do it for its side-effect), then do that and return its value" in Scheme. Some forms have implicit begins, however.
I may just be repeating myself, but I hope phrasing it slightly differently helped. What made it clear to me was learning Scheme and (especially) OCaml, then going back to Python and programming in a functional/expression-oriented style, seeing the subtle ways in which the design of the language resists it. Lua is more friendly to functional programming than Python (it has tail-call optimization, for starters), but those explicit returns still show it isn't a perfect fit.