One of my first Django projects was to “bastardize” its admin into a Lead/Opportunity management system for a mortgage broker, back in the version 0.96 days. I know that monkey-patching is now frowned upon and reguarded as “the work of the devil” but it really helped me get the job done for that project in a pretty reasonable amount of time. I hope dynamic programming makes a come-back.

This is a surprisingly pretty common practice. I know people, even at Google, who want the ease of CMS but additional control.