The problem is not bloat so much as forced paradigm. There are a lot of problems that don't fit nicely in Django, and suddenly you find yourself writing a bunch

The problem is not bloat so much as forced paradigm. There are a lot of problems that don't fit nicely in Django, and suddenly you find yourself writing a bunch of code to work around the framework. An example - something I hear a lot of from local Django fans: "Oh that's simple - just ship it off to another process using celery and be done with it". That's great sometimes. Other times why not just use Bottle or flask and do a thin "translate to http" layer and move on? Another problem with many of the existing big frameworks is that they don't do single page apps too well - A lot of stuff I do these days just doesn't need to be designed around the notion of composing templated widgets server side. I just want to ship static html/tpl/etc files and dynamically built data. Wrapping my head around pretending everything is a full page build gets a bit frustrating - why is the response to a query a view or *view? It's just a serialized model I'm pushing over the wire, or a remote function call. Pretending it is a view is a layer of cognitive overheard in between the work I'm doing and the data I'm using.