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