I'd say the big thing is helping us avoid reinventing the wheel. There's a lot of problems that every webapp has, and Django provides a system for solving most

I'd say the big thing is helping us avoid reinventing the wheel. There's a lot of problems that every webapp has, and Django provides a system for solving most of them. I particularly enjoy their migrations and automated testing systems. When we need to integrate something that a lot of other people have, whether it be 2FA or SAML or LDAP or webpack, there's generally a reasonable library for it (or often, a reasonable way to do it built in, and Django's documentation is great so it's easy to figure that out). While there are some land mines with any ORM, the Django ORM does allow us to write the vast majority of our database operations with clean Pythonic code, rather than going to raw SQL. We need SQL in a few performance-intensive code paths, but it's the exception, rather than the rule, and the ORM is constantly getting better. And in contrast with some other ecosystems I've worked with, the libraries generally are well-written, well-tested, and stable, so even if they're not well-maintained because the old maintainer changed jobs or got busy or whatever, it doesn't feel like a burden to fork or adopt the library. I'm not particularly happy with Django forms or Django REST framework with how they organization validation code. For the former, I think the problem is just kinda messy; we mostly solve it by only using Django forms for the authentication code paths where we can reuse its libraries. For the latter, we have a framework we built that I'm very happy with and we plan to spin out for other projects to use when we have a bit of time. There's some documentation here: https://zulip.readthedocs.io/en/latest/tutorials/writing-views.html#request-variables https://zulip.readthedocs.io/en/latest/tutorials/writing-vie... for those curious; though that doesn't cover cool details like the mypy integration we did more recently.