I've been hacking Django apps around 50kLOC for a couple of years and have found it generally very well designed. It is true that the best-documented interface

I've been hacking Django apps around 50kLOC for a couple of years and have found it generally very well designed. It is true that the best-documented interfaces often don't meet your needs exactly, but I've had a lot of good results reaching into Django a bit. Sometimes this just means using some inconspicuous base classes instead of more "convenient" subclasses. Other times it results in some hacking monkey patches. But on the whole, I've found that it saves me time frequently, and in cases when it won't, it gets out of the way pretty fast. That said, it is still a full-stack framework, and it is definitely targeted at sites that mostly serve dynamic pages. Like all frameworks, it has its archetypal projects, and for Django it's blogs/CMS/online community apps. The further your project is from that archetype, the less useful the framework will be.