Django is just badly designed. Many things in Django don't work right from the start, and changing them is a big, big pain. When I tried Django, I had to make some changes to the authentication (I can't remember well, but I think I wanted to be able to sign in with email addresses). It was a big pain that took quite a while, and made it incompatible with the rest.

In the end, as the application grew, I had to throw out most of Django and just use my own custom written code. Steep learning curve for a process that will be thrown out later anyways.

A micro-framework is much better. At least you can mix and match as you want.