I've only recently come back to it, and I do hope they continue to add more batteries to their "batteries included" framework over time. I was surprised just how much stuff I had to add to my little project that will require updating _outside_ the main framework, eg.:
* django-components for little template partials (I'm not sure the new partials feature is robust enough to replace this)
* django-(configurator,split-settings,pick-your-poison-here) for more robust settings management
* structlog for much better logging (feels like this should get baked into Python's stdlib...)
* debug-toolbar
* dj-database-url for parsing database URLs (should be baked in!)
* django-money
There's plenty of other deps that are less annoying/surprising (eg. Sentry, granian, Tailwind), but the set above feel like more or less like they should be baked in, and (to my mind) don't represent an inordinate amount of work to adopt.
Other than that, it's been a real pleasure coming back to it, and I'm excited for its continuation.
EDIT -- oh, and built-in static types, stubs and stubs-ext were a bit of a nightmare to get working well.
Yes, there’s some rough edges. Like updating can be tricky sometimes, and performance relating to DB queries is a skill in itself, but in general it’s a great framework to build most web software out there.
There’s no real world brokers or workers supported (at least built in), but still centralising around a standard interface might make things nicer than the celery tentacle monsters Django apps eventually tend to mutate into.
It is fairly LLM friendly, so it is dead easy to whip up an admin panel for something in an evening.