I don't think I really understand the limitations we're talking about. No you wouldn't ever want to write an app that had real-time elements in pure Django, but

I don't think I really understand the limitations we're talking about. No you wouldn't ever want to write an app that had real-time elements in pure Django, but isn't that what Celery is for? I bet with a solid messaging queue and good architecture you could write a pretty convincing real-time app using Django as not much more than a REST api to celery tasks and the database (and really, that abstraction is what a framework is for anyway). Besides, this sky-is-falling nonsense around frameworks is getting old. A framework either lives or dies. Django has a very healthy community around it and they are doing a great job right now of keeping the framework stable so folks who "just need to get work done" can get work done. There haven't been a lot of revolutions, and that's fine for me. Believe it or not, there's still a market for content-heavy, traditional MVC websites. And when you need to add real-time elements, Django, Celery and Django REST Framework are up to the task a vast majority of the time.