bigger frameworks like django tend to get in your way for anything that the framework was not intended for. not every web app is a "fetch content from db and display to users"

try doing something workflow heavy on appengine with datastore. The django orm wont work for datastore, so what you are left with out of the framework is regex based routing(ewww) and a bunch of crippled components(meaning depending on an orm you can't use).

django has it's place dont get me wrong, i would use it to quickly squeeze out internal db backed apps all day. maybe even use it as a cms. But i'd rather not do those kinds of projects at all.