I honestly think Django was a victim of it's own success. It started as a python (explicit is better than implicit) framework, but with a ruby-on-rails (convention over configuration) mentality. It became too successful too fast and it was too late to change things without breaking things. I remember it had all sorts of double import issues, a very limited (compared to jinja2) template engine and a very limited (compared to SQL Alchemy) ORM. It also coupled everything with everything, so it made it very hard to fix those issues. So as people grew into their projects, django got in the way. Most things were hidden in the framework lazily loaded so when you had some weird issues you didn't know where to look. I found it hard to digest that I couln't write a simple script that accesses the database without having to go through the entire autodiscovery process, hence incurring a 2-3 second delay on every execution. We also stopped upgrading at some point, because by the time django started supporting our special needs (especially around user handling), we already hacked around it, and upgrading would have been near impossible. The core developers probably knew all of these and they did more and more "de-magic-ification" with every version, and things are much better now, but we are stuck on an old version.