I will safely assume that as a beginner I was missing some part of the puzzle, but I was never able to track down a good way to do it. Oh well.
It took me a while to get a solid handle on them, but Django usually does forms very well. The best case is that your UI requirements are fairly loose, otherwise it's likely you'll end up with mostly-custom HTML, but even then you still have the potential to save a lot of Python code with things like ModelForms and/or FormViews.
Crispy forms: http://django-crispy-forms.readthedocs.org/en/latest/
Floppy forms:http://django-floppyforms.readthedocs.org/en/latest/
If you're using a lot of code to generate forms that depend on models, look into ModelForms: they allow you to generate a form that maps to a specific model's fields trivially and allow adding additional validation and persisting the model to the database.
There is the package wtforms, however, which I've found is more pleasant than django forms.