However, I think it's one of the best examples of phenomenal documentation.

I learned a lot from reading the Django codebase. I didn't read it like a book, I read parts of it as I tried to figure out how to do things in Django, but I never felt like the code was bad. This was around 5 years ago so it's possible things have gotten more convoluted since then.

If the OP wants to grok a small, discrete codebase then I agree that Django is not what he's looking for.

No, definitely no. Django aged well in terms of being alive, usable and comfortable to use in most usecases. But the codebase... Let me explain. Currently it works as "pay-to-get-a-feature" by crowdfounding. It not a bad thing, it gives good features we all need, but it is a bit sad fact when you look at Rails. So, it doesn't mean Django developers doesn't care about code, they care. But codebase is so big and complicated(because some code needs to be refactored)... it is common to see that some bug cannot be simply fixed by two lines, because some core member insists "this all should be reworked".

Have you considered building something with Django and figuring out the magic as you go along??

I would start with django.core.handlers.base.BaseHandler (https://github.com/django/django/blob/master/django/core/han...), which is Django's Front Controller.