I have a very similar relationship with .NET MVC + EF. I suppose Django would win against it (them) by a mile in the "batteries included" battle but oh boy was I productive with it, especially with some jQuery and knockout.js for the frontend. I really felt like I could build anything CRUD with the tools I had (I was specialized in system integration) and I had the fortune of getting paid for it. Now even the smallest memory of some of the code I've written back then makes me cringe, but I learned a lot.

From those experiences you not only learn what to do, you get "what not to do" and "ah these parts are useful because of this" kind of information as well.