2. Nothing is stopping you from using multiple files for config. We use a config module with a separate file for DB, caching, DRF and etc.
3. Testing with pytest is pretty nice too.
Django rest framework is what makes Django great these days.
That said, everything is easy once you know how to do it. If this was the first time you've done this or there was research involved, it definitely makes sense that it would take longer!
I'm mostly asking bc I'm curious if you came upon a level of complexity that I simply haven't encountered.
Your complaints are valid from a subjective perspective, but if your bar for something being "a pain" is really "took longer than 10 minutes", I can't imagine how you function as a software engineer as even in Rails there are many things that will take longer to do.
That's when I decided to pick up Rails tutorial and it was probably one of the best tech-related decisions I made in my businesses.
I shouldn't use cookiecutter templates, plugins, scripts to make working with the software tolerable. It should just work and get out of my way. Well, at least when doing a greenfield development.
Take a look: https://rubyonrails.org/doctrine/
In comparison, I too could waste my entire weekend tinkering with something in Rails, but I instead choose to do things the right way and look up a tutorial to explain how to do it easily, which it sounds like you did with Rails. Why you didn't do this with Django instead of wasting weeks, I dunno.
Again, if you prefer rails for subjective reasons that's fine. But blaming Django for being "too much of a pain" just because it sounds like you chose to do things the difficult way is pretty unfair.