After working with Django for a bit I'm finding myself thinking that it's a typical framework: great for when you need what it provides, a giant pain when you need to work outside the box.

For larger applications I think I still prefer Pylons, even though I haven't worked with it for something like 4 years. It's way more work up front and therefore not suitable for smaller projects with tight deadlines but it has a LOT less cruft to deal with (i.e. SQLAlchemy as ORM vs the crappy old Django thing, Mako as default vs crappy Django template language, better Jinja2 support[1] in Pylons).

[1] To be fair to Django, the biggest problem here is one of documentation: not being clear about how you can use Jinja2 for your own templates without losing the admin even though this appears to be possible.