> its perfectly possible to write a one file/ten loc Django app

Examples: http://olifante.blogs.com/covil/2010/04/minimal-django.html https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1297873/how-do-i-write-a..., and also this interesting one: https://github.com/simonw/djng where the guy builds a microframework which uses Django.

In your last example, "the guy" is one of the people who was on the team that originally created Django, back when it was an internal tool for building a news CMS.