My experience report is based on operating a production API with about 30 DB models, not incredibly complex, but with somewhat non-standard requirements like multi-tenancy. This opinion is shared by the developers on my team as well, if that's worth anything in addition.

I've found the easy stuff to be very easy to do in the Django admin, and every time I've tried to do something off the beaten track, it's taken me days instead of the hours or minutes it feels like it should do.

Any of these would be good examples of things that feel like they should be easy, but aren't:

* Adding a link to a custom page onto the frontpage of the admin, ideally under a custom "App" header. * Creating a read-only view onto related objects (impossible in some situations, depending on the direction of the FKey relationship, annoying in others). * Presenting a form for creating nested one-to-one objects along with a parent.

I'm sure that if you routinely make modifications to the Django Admin it gets easier; the second time on any of these items is 10-100 times quicker for me.

I'd blame the poor code discoverability of the template-based system, poor documentation, and lack of a broad corpus of examples for making this harder than it could be.