Zed's "One Battery Review" of Django
That was pretty much my first impression of Django as well, and I bet it's the impression they want to leave.<p>The reality doesn't really hit home for a few weeks.  Django gives you all sorts of really cool stuff right out of the box that does nearly everything for you.  The problem comes when you want to do something just that little bit different, and you find yourself unrolling every single piece of it one-by-one as you discover that these pieces don't fit your needs exactly.<p>I also found myself baffled by the terrible decision to make everything revolve around function calls rather than a Request and Response object.  No matter what happens in your page flow, you still need to return a HttpRequest object at the end of the day.  No more Response.Write();Response.End(); from any point.  You need to have every bit of code capable of returning in a way that triggers the thing above it to return in a way to trigger the thing above it to return a HttpRequest object.  Makes debugging a serious pain.<p>So yeah, if you're doing a simple CMS for a media site (which is what they wrote Django to do), it rocks the house.  If you're trying to do any heavy lifting, it seems to fall apart pretty fast.<p>I don't think I'd use it again.