First of: I'm trying to be helpful, not a fanboy.

Where did you get stumped with Django?

I use Django to do all kinds of "non-traditional" stuff (key-based API authentication, automatic object-level caching, custom form fields, using Postgres features such as UUID fields and fulltext search) and none of it took me that much work. But then, I've been using Django for a few years now and know the ins and outs quite well.

I can see how you'd be enticed by a simpler framework such as webapp2 or Flask as a starting point. But I've found that Django is as flexible if you just consider that most of the built-in features that Django provides (even the awesome ORM) are optional if you know what apps and middleware to disable.