In my opinion the user (where user is a web developer) facing layer of Django is among the best I've ever worked with. I will agree with you that the internals

In my opinion the user (where user is a web developer) facing layer of Django is among the best I've ever worked with. I will agree with you that the internals are very messy and hard to read and work with. The overall architecture is sound though. Tight coupling of core components, loose coupling of non-core components. Keep in mind that it's an "opinionated" framework though, so they do safely assume that if you're using django you want to be using its core components as a bundle, and will work with them as designed.