What I like about Django are the following things:

(1) It seems whenever I need to adjust how something works, there is some field or method, that I can override, or meta class attribute to set. None of it seems too inflexible. Overriding or changing how things work somehow always feels like someone already thought of this special case I have, and has made it mostly easy to do. Often when I have such a customization case, I have this feeling: "AH, that's how it is supposed to be done in Django." instead of having a feeling of having to fight the framework.

(2) Just being able to use a normal template engine (I always use Jinja2 with Django), instead of having some wannabe HTML lookalike thing. I don't want to have to encode control flow inside HTML attributes. Why then make it look like HTML in the first place, if some JS framework then picks it apart? It is unnecessarily cumbersome to do that, and Django doesn't engage in that.

(3) The ORM is good, and flexible. Some traps for many queries though. But also escape hatches, which let one write ORM calls, that will translate to efficient SQL in most cases.

(4) Django makes it so easy (comparatively) to write a phenomenal searching and ranking function for ones database entities. Check for example the code of my blog [1]. One page of code, very adjustable to ones needs.

(5) Handling of routes is easy. `reverse` is very useful to not have to hardcode routes.

(6) Even when using third-party things like django-allauth it is easy to override templates, without having to modify the dependency itself. With foresight there exists a way to put ones own templates in a place that is discovered before the other package's templates.

(7) Adjustable django admin. I often have some "Tags" in my models, which are many-to-many. For example Posts-TagAssignment-Tag, where TagAssignment is a "throught table". In Django admin one can have a nice little modification [2] to make a very usable widget appear for assigning tags.

In short: It very much gets out of ones way.

[1]: https://codeberg.org/ZelphirKaltstahl/django-website/src/com...

[2]: https://codeberg.org/ZelphirKaltstahl/django-website/src/com...