I'm currently staring at a PostgreSQL database created by a Django app with a lot of inheritance between models.

My favorite /s is the table with a single column containing the id of the record itself.

It's basically impossible to start from the database and understand what's going on. It will be a huge pain to interface to this database from something else.

On the other side, I'm maintaining another Django app for the same customer, with saner tables (no inheritance) and that's on par with other ORMs.

My take is never use inheritance with Django.

Never use inheritance at all? I was thinking you could reconstruct part of the app stack by observing and clustering the requests and transactions. But then some people think join is the devil and you'd be back to square one. In a perfect world every app would have only views over what they need and prepared requests. But then CI/CD and all kind of tests can become very painful...

Django is just plain bad at data modeling there I said it

I don't know you, but I think we'd be great friends based solely on this statement.

I don’t make friends as easily as hating on any technology but I do make friends easily on kindness. Hi! I learned a lot great and not great working with DRF. Kind of took it and ran with it on TypeScript and Node. Working on a much better HTTP interface for that platform.

Reminds me of the Fred Brooks quote, "Show me your flowchart and conceal your tables, and I shall continue to be mystified. Show me your tables, and I won't usually need your flowchart; it'll be obvious."

It always starts with the data.