I'm not too familiar with Django but with several other frameworks and I definitely feel like this applies to lots of them out there.
In my experience though, I've worked on teams with developers who criticize frameworks for those reasons, choose a minimal or no framework at all, and spend a ton of extra, unnecessary time reinventing a worse version of a framework they decided 'sucked' once they realize they need security, error handling, form processing, an ORM etc... Over-engineering is an epidemic.
I almost went down this route on a project once. As soon as I noticed myself writing an identity map, I slapped myself in the face and just downloaded Symfony.
Funnily, this is the reason I adore Slim so much. In the PHP world, it gives me exactly what I require in a framework, and nothing else. Slapping it on top of a well-defined class heirachy becomes a simple exercise. I like it so much, that I'm porting it to Hack/HHVM[0]!
Symfony is awesome but I feel they try to stuff too much into the default framework configuration. I don't want all those silly annotations, for example.
Django actually seems to be one of the least offensive frameworks to me in that respect. It didn't really try to be clever and it did things that made sense with a minimal amount of magic.
Great point. That's probably the worst case, IMO, along with over-engineering and plain spaghetti. I should have mentioned it, but I think my PTSD from dealing with such engineers and projects is still overwhelming.
In my experience though, I've worked on teams with developers who criticize frameworks for those reasons, choose a minimal or no framework at all, and spend a ton of extra, unnecessary time reinventing a worse version of a framework they decided 'sucked' once they realize they need security, error handling, form processing, an ORM etc... Over-engineering is an epidemic.