I started with Drupal when it was 4.7, shortly to move to 5.x. We had a group blog, and it did the job pretty well, and it felt good to take advantage of things like maps modules and tagging. But niggling pains were there. Having to add extra modules to deal with duplicate pages ending in /, and while views was pretty simple point-and-click at the start, it seemed like it could do a lot more.

As time progressed, we added voting, rss aggregation, quizzes, and started extending views with URL arguments, relationships, fancy combinations of filters, login was via OAuth, and we were at 7.x by now. It was feeling unwieldy. Always aggressive in theming, what we wanted to do was taking an increasing amount of time, both in function and appearance.

A new project came along, and I thought, eh, Drupal can do that. And it surely could, seeing a nail, Drupal is a hammer that can do anything.

But it does it in a way where maintenance, or getting things exactly the way you want become incredibly time-consuming, and the code is a maze unless you're in it 24/7, and we had chosen Drupal not to be in code 24/7.

My background is not as a developer, but finance where using technology is an important skill. I can Bash, Ruby, JS, VBA/.Net, Python, R, and a few others to varying levels.

I shuddered a little when seriously considering Drupal as a solution to this new problem, mapping out the edge cases and exactly how many modules were needed (60+).

I ended up taking a week off learning NodeJS and using hapi as a framework. Just because I wanted a fresh start, not that I was enthralled with Node, but as so many others were using it, surely something was there.

This freshness gave some time to think about what I actually wanted, and to back-track from there, focusing on simplicity and well, simplicity. How to make everything as simple as possible, which is what a high level code framework offers.

You don't sound that technical, and I don't have experience with Django, however I recommend taking a code-approach, even if you don't want or need to be sitting in code, as you'll have access to and know how everything really works, not a pre-written GUI one where you're clutching at straws. Most web challenges are about the idea, the code implementation for what you sound like your doing, at an initial stage, is probably that not complex, and if you have success with the core idea, get technical talent onboard to optimise or do the things you find too hard.

A word of warning, however: Focus on making things simple. That will stop you going into a rabbit warren filled with code spaghetti.

tl;dr

Drupal is an excellent tool for publishing, and accommodates some complex publishing workflows that need multiple authors or layers of editing or approval. Core modules like comments or maps compliment this, but that's it. If your core need is greater than publishing (I suppose marketplace is publishing, and there are eCommerce modules), Drupal is a quick solution, but if your long-term roadmap means doing something remotely unique technically or in UX, roll your own using a framework to prevent re-inventing the wheel (and ending up with security nightmares). Bring on technical talent at an early stage when your idea seems proved. If you have funding, do this right away.