I pretty much agree with all of the points raised here about Django, and I've been using it professionally for almost 3 years. The core development team is incredibly hostile to improvements that don't fit some fluffy definition of where they see Django going, to the point where some of the best coders I know are incredibly discouraged from contributing patches or improvements, and just release their stuff on GitHub instead. That's the wrong way for an open source project to be, in my opinion.