No, I'm not sure why you're so dedicated to promoting Django's negative qualities as if they're virtues. The rigidity is not preferable, in any circumstance. It's simply less adaptive, and therefore less useful, architecture.

If you want simple, you can use adaptive frameworks simply. They come with defaults just like Django does. The difference is that it's easy to swap or mix-and-match components, and it's an intended use case. On Django, if you don't go with vanilla, it's a hack.

As I wrote elsewhere, "batteries included" doesn't (or shouldn't) mean "batteries hard-welded". It's fine to include stuff and have defaults; adaptive frameworks have these too, but they considered the fact that someone may want to do something irregular at some point and that it shouldn't be a world-breaking experience for that to happen. A framework that understands its place is all gain, in that it doesn't intrude and try to force something, and no loss, in that it also comes with defaults that you can just use if you aren't yet at a stage where you'd have a reason to replace them, and therefore, from an objective technical standpoint, it is a better choice. Perhaps social issues override this in some situations, but those can't be considered in our removed, objective, technical context.

>I'll be the first to bemoan Django for its flaws (it has many, as do all frameworks), but this is absurdly misguided thinking. There are tons of success stories to the contrary, with new ones adding to the pile every day.

It doesn't matter if there are success stories. I'll repeat myself, I guess, and say that I don't intend to say that Django is useless or terrible or that it does nothing and will ruin your life. The point is that most people who choose Django for technical (not social like "we all already know django") reasons are making an incorrect choice. For now "we all already know django" is acceptable, just like "well we all already know SVN" was, but at some point it won't cut it anymore, and you'll be expected to adapt.

>Django is batteries included. Pyramid is not.

I disagree. Pyramid comes with batteries. It has a full stack ready to go for you if you just want to open it up and code, just like Django does. The difference is that Pyramid allows you to tweak or swap freely as necessary, and Django makes it difficult.

>It's flat out wrong to make a blanket statement like yours.

No, it isn't. My blanket statement is generally but not all inclusive. Is it wrong to say "Using Windows 2000 as the primary hosting platform for new projects is almost always wrong"? Things change in tech. Rigid generic frameworks that try to dictate templaters and ORMs are old hat, they are plainly incorrect for all but the most esoteric use cases. There is no good reason to do this.

Is Django going to disappear overnight? No, but I hope that people can get past their holy wars and take a serious objective analysis. Consider that you're actually against a useful feature set just because the less-powerful solution is often "good enough". That's not a reason to choose a thing, it's just a reason not to flee from a thing. I'm not saying every Django app needs to be rewritten, but I do think it's silly to settle on "good enough" for new stuff when "much better" is available at little or no downside.