Django is cool, and has been my choice for a fair number of projects. Although recently I had an interesting experience with it when I wanted to use websockets (yes, I know it's not written for that use case).

It was stunning that most of the solutions out there rely on some sort of a hack to get it working. I ended up porting over my project to Tornado, because I need websockets for a lot of the features I'm working on. And it worked out really well, especially after I combined it with SQLAlchemy and Alembic. 80% of the feature set right there. And SQLAlchemy is such a fantastic toolkit.

I'm hoping that django channels (http://channels.readthedocs.org/en/latest/) stabilizes soon.