I’m most comfortable in .net core but I recently learned Django because I kept hearing how productive it was from HN and all the startups around me use it, but Im starting to feel like I chose to move the wrong way. I will say I like how Postgres is the default for python and the library situation is much better over there as well.

I've tried working with Django and it's always seemed much too heavyweight to me. Flask is my preferred web framework for Python; much easier for me to use and feels like it's helping me where needed and getting out of my way where needed, not weighing me down.

Yeah I actually wrote a prototype in Django and flask and just felt like I was reinventing the wheel too much with flask. e.g. marshmellow = serializer from DRF, sqlalchemy = django orm, etc. I wrote password hashing with bcrypt for user logins and then realized I should salt the passwords and just went back to django since it already has stuff for everything I was doing.

I actually don't mind the heavy framework thing because .net core mvc is the same deal. The developer experience in python was just way worse for me. Autogenerating swagger docs didn't seem possible without manually adding annotations to all my code (for flask at least), the battle-tested python libraries for web dev aren't async, mypy is obviously way worse than an actual type system, model validation (the thing forms/serializers handle) was more tedious, vscode was worse than visuals tudio.

Django is very good if you want your end-site to be "CMS like". It comes will a lot of accessories to help in that goal.

Flask is lighter and it is more DIY but easier if you have something that is more generic.

Yeah I've heard that before, but from my (admittedly brief) time it seemed like you could just use the utilities you want and ignore the stuff that forces you into a CMS'y box. Feels like if you really wanted to you could just use a form/serializer to validate input data and to return a domain object, pass the domain object to a service layer, and then use the django orm (or honestly anything if you really want to stray from the django way), to handle database interactions. I understand flask might be nicer because you get to feel like you dont have a bunch of wasted code bloat in your deployable, but there are some pluggable systems that come with django that are nice (user system, pluggable authn/authz, caching framework, etc.) I didn't really mind the bloat because a lean deployable isn't that important to me and it all felt sluggish to me compared to .net core anyway.

Yes you can definitely pick and choose the parts of Django you want. Sometimes they have interdependencies but you don't need to use it all. Or for example, use Jinja instead of its templating system

I am a little confused by your post. Moving to Django is the wrong way?

Yeah Django feels terrible to me compared to .net core. I already wrote a similar answer to someone else so I will just paste it here

"The developer experience in python was just way worse for me. Autogenerating swagger docs didn't seem possible without manually adding annotations to all my code (for flask at least), the battle-tested python libraries like django and sqlalchemy aren't built for async, mypy is obviously way worse than an actual type system and having static types really helps with understanding a large new code base, model validation (the thing forms/serializers handle) was more tedious, vscode was worse than visual studio (code navigation was very hard to do in python. I could jump 1 layer into library code, but when I tried to jump deeper vscode couldn't find anything.)"

I've seen people say you should only choose rails or django for a startup, but .net core mvc provides the same batteries included approach and is built with the modern web ecosystem in mind. It also runs on linux and easily integrates with postgres so its just as cheap now as well. I think people that write off C# haven't really worked with it in its present form. I didn't find python significantly more terse than C# (other than having to define properties on types, which I already stated I prefer), just less feature rich.

Same here, for me it has been mostly about .NET, Java or anything else with JIT/AOT compilers out of the box, after my AOLServer like experience.

Back then we already had Zope and it wasn't blazing fast.

Or Azure Functions if you want to go the serverless route. Coupled with Visual Studio, you can build high quality, large scale apps at about the same effort of blinking a LED on Arduino.

Are we using the same Azure Functions? I spend more time messing with functions.json and determining binding types and waiting five minutes for error messages to come in than I ever did when I simply provisioned an app service and deployed code.

Feel the same way with lambda.