It sounds like a lot of the complaints are about their ORM layer. I'll point out that Rails (a very comparable project) has a lot of cruft in ActiveRecord, the

It sounds like a lot of the complaints are about their ORM layer. I'll point out that Rails (a very comparable project) has a lot of cruft in ActiveRecord, their ORM layer, as well. I can't directly compare it to Django's, but it's a bit of a hairball. Some of it is just that it's hard to write a good ORM layer. Let's hope that Django can also take a Rails 3-esque approach -- make the ORM layer modular, then use whichever you like. That's a surprisingly good way to disentangle the internals of the ORM from everything else. And once you do that, it gets a lot easier to polish up the code, or if necessary replace it with something prettier. I imagine a fair number of the Rails 3 folks will be replacing ActiveRecord with DataMapper, for somewhat similar reasons. I plan to.