&quot;Crusty&quot; is just another way of saying, &quot;<i>I&#x27;ve actually used it for a real application before, or at least know someone first-hand who&#x27;s used it in production</i>&quot;.<p>When something is early in the HN hype cycle, all anyone knows is blog posts and &quot;hello world&quot; experiments.  So it&#x27;s awesome.  Once you use something for a real project, you inevitably run into real-world issues or limitations.  So it sucks.  And you chase the dragon toward the next newly-hyped thing.<p>In all seriousness, though... sheesh.  Django isn&#x27;t even a decade old yet.  Rails is older, and Sinatra and its clones are barely any younger.  There really haven&#x27;t been any revolutionary ideas in MVC frameworks this decade.