I've found the same thing with django. It does some things well (the admin interface, for example.) Other things it does in ways that seem very unintuitive and unpythonic.
For example:
- includes a test framework, but tests on a fresh project don't pass
- no relative paths in settings.py make it hard to work with other people (sure, since settings.py is python code you can write code to get around it, but I don't like that approach)
- you can't extend the User class (except by using deprecated code); the workaround is to create a one-to-one table but that's ugly.
- templates have their own control structures rather than using the ones pythonists already know (django's ifequals vs. python's if, for example)
If you're fed up with django, try Pylons. It is very loosely coupled, to the point where the recommended ORM and template system are separate projects (SQLAlchemy and Mako).
For example:
- includes a test framework, but tests on a fresh project don't pass
- no relative paths in settings.py make it hard to work with other people (sure, since settings.py is python code you can write code to get around it, but I don't like that approach)
- you can't extend the User class (except by using deprecated code); the workaround is to create a one-to-one table but that's ugly.
- templates have their own control structures rather than using the ones pythonists already know (django's ifequals vs. python's if, for example)
If you're fed up with django, try Pylons. It is very loosely coupled, to the point where the recommended ORM and template system are separate projects (SQLAlchemy and Mako).