I disagree with the parent post; Django's codebase is overall pretty high quality. It definitely used not to be that way, though.
But there are components that fit that. The entire form subsystem is awful to work with. Working with Javascript, webpack apps etc is a huge pain.
The template syntax is also a failed design experiment, based on the premise that backend coders and template authors are not the same people and should not have the same level of power -- some of this is based on a good idea at its core, but Django ended up backtracking on that half-way and we're now with a very inconsistent template system and having to implement kludgy template tags and filters or new object methods that do not take parameters whenever we want to do anything remotely complex.. At this point I wish it'd just move towards supporting Jinja syntax (that is, alongside the regular syntax, not as a separate engine like it's currently possible).
I think the form abstraction is one of the better versions of it that I've seen in any of the web frameworks I've worked with. It's simple and elegant for most forms, and can even handle complicated ones (multipart forms, file attachments, complex validation scenarios, etc.) reasonably well.
on a really fundamental level working with complicated forms is just a complicated thing to do, no matter what kind of technology you're doing it with.
Django added Jinja2 as a built-in template backend some versions ago. The Django ecosystem hasn't really caught up to supporting it with reusable templates yet though.
Yeah I mentioned that. I don't think it can ever really work the way it's implemented right now. I think the only way it can work is slowly transitioning the Django template language to be syntactically similar to Jinja, that will give a progressive transition path. But it's a ton of work.
But even then you can really feel how painful it is to work with, especially if you're adding typescript/scss to the mix. Solutions like Django Compressor are not really the right model anymore.
And there's other issues as well. If you want to share settings between Django and the JS stack for example, you'll need to build your own pipeline for that. Building a form in react? Say goodbye to DRY on the form fields. Just, in general, Django predates JS apps being anything more than in-place enhancements and it shows.
I do use DRF; but it's quite painful to have to set up all the intermingling between the API urls and the actual form definitions. I don't use Django forms; you will generally want a single source of truth for the forms and it kind of has to live in the JS, but then that makes it inaccessible to Django...
For large apps it makes sense to do it this way. For smaller apps it really sucks.
The template system is sometimes a pain, but sometimes the fact that it pushes you to move complexity out of the HTML and into Python code can make for more maintainable code in the long run. That's at least been my experience over the years.
But there are components that fit that. The entire form subsystem is awful to work with. Working with Javascript, webpack apps etc is a huge pain.
The template syntax is also a failed design experiment, based on the premise that backend coders and template authors are not the same people and should not have the same level of power -- some of this is based on a good idea at its core, but Django ended up backtracking on that half-way and we're now with a very inconsistent template system and having to implement kludgy template tags and filters or new object methods that do not take parameters whenever we want to do anything remotely complex.. At this point I wish it'd just move towards supporting Jinja syntax (that is, alongside the regular syntax, not as a separate engine like it's currently possible).