&#62;the larger one Django immediately turned from 'enabler' in to 'straightjacket'.<p>Yeah, I've had a bit of enlightenment regarding that. I think the trick is to eventually treat it a bit like Philosophy.<p>Toss aside what you encounter to be a problem, take with you what is useful.<p>The signals backend and request object encapsulation has proven invaluable, combined with the corpus of snippets and tricks out there.<p>The templates are really starting to get on my nerves. Probably going to use Jinja2 outside of work here on out.<p>well, it's been a step-up from what I've experienced because of a perfect storm occurring from the power of combining generic views, quick-n-easy pagination, the ORM, and template inheritance. I've become incredibly productive in Django in spite of the annoyances.<p>In fact, you may want to check out "annoying django" for some hacks and neat features to deal with some painpoints.<p>This includes an AJAX view decorator to quickly pass json back and forth.