Still, I look at things in Django and get angry that they were not MORE opinionated, like Rails. Like, not having a decent REST abstraction out of the box is almost unforgivable in this day and age.
I think Django's evolutionary decision making has been nothing short of fucking awesome. They've consistently waited until a clear, mature 3rd party winner has emerged for problems before integrating them. When those solutions are integrated, they're battle tested and not going to bite you into the ass.
Django's team is very aware of where their weaknesses are, and they're working on them:
We've been awarded $150,000 to help fund the development of Channels, the initiative to rewrite the core of Django to support (among other things) WebSockets and background tasks, and to integrate key parts of the Django REST Framework request/response code into Django, such as content negotiation. Together, these projects will help considerably improve Django's role of backing rich web experiences as well as native applications.
https://www.djangoproject.com/weblog/2015/dec/11/django-awar...
Rails opinionated approach lead to heavy churn in the 2 -> 3 -> 4 transitions. I don't want to deal with that.
Will still have to see where people run into the most trouble and go from there. But I would enjoy it if people could pick up Nodal and walk away confident they could build an ES6 app from scratch.
The community has stepped in here.
Django Rest-framework provides one of the best approaches for creating restful apis that any web framework has to offer. For me, using Django is inseparable from using Django Rest-framework. Its what makes working with Django great.
Nodal by comparison does a lot of great things like Django does, but without the robustness of a rest framework behind it, Nodal seems to have created another good framework but not something new and better.
My argument is just that REST is not the type of problem that should warrant having three competing libraries (see comment above).. It has been pretty fundamental to the way you build modern apps ever since SPAs became a big thing.
To think that Rails got many of these things right-ish in version 1.2 which was released in 2007 is pretty damn impressive and speaks volumes about the technical clairvoyance of the ruby/rails community.