Just wondering, why have you not gone with Django directly if you’ve essentially ended up reimplementing your own version of it?
you start simple, but then you realize you need some kind of db access, some kind of caching, some kind of authentication, maybe some admin interfaces.... aaand you re-implemented django yet again.
The pulling in of other tools happened naturally over time. Perhaps we reinvented the wheel and Django may have saved some time or effort, but ultimately in the end we gained a very deep knowledge of the system we have and the things that make it work, and how those individual pieces might be usable in other projects/scenarios.
A large driver was honestly just that we had no organizational experience in Django, and so there was no one that even would have looked at it and said “Hey we’re just recreating what Django already does”.