Being from Omaha, this is pretty exciting. I'm glad to see some interest in the city and hope this continues to be something that helps Nebraska as a whole grow to be a better climate for developers.
While it is true that Django may be quite a large framework, a 'kitchen sink' in a way, I feel that many people often miss the point of what a framework is, in that you don't have to use all of it.
In my few years of developing in Django I have had my frustrations and joys, many of the frustrations coming from the idea that I should do things how the framework wants me to, only to realize that it is still python that I'm writing code in. The idea of Django is not to be some utopian framework where all of your pythonic dreams come true, it is to enable you to build applications quickly and with ease.
While Django may have been created to be a publishing platform, our primary use for it is a genetic analysis application, which is complicated enough without having to worry about the framework, and trust me, Django is not anywhere near a problem in the app. We also use Django for a separate report delivery system, which has API endpoints and is constantly being fed data from 3 other applications, and again, Django has never been an issue.
Sure, you can roll your own libraries with something small like Flask, and reinvent the wheel many times over, but do you actually get features rolled out? Or are you constantly patting yourself on the back for keeping such a small codebase while maintaining a home-grown system and hoping you can get a feature out the door while fixing all of the bugs that not only the system may have introduced, but your features as well.
Here are my biggest worries of a very customized/home grown framework:
1) Does the knowledge of the framework transfer to the next project you work on?
2) Are you writing documentation so that the next person can understand the code? If so whats the time cost for that?
3) Are you spending more time building the perfect system or rolling out features?
Don't get me wrong though, I love working with small polished libraries and connecting them together, namely in node.js, but it is entertaining more than productive.
I have one problem with it though, is that everyone's cursor appears to jump to the same spot when someone makes a change. This makes it somewhat impossible for multiple authors of one file.