I am a huge advocate for the Django web framework, yet I always tell people that web frameworks (Django|Rails|etc) are not for beginners. Like many have mentioned, it's easy for experienced web programmers that have been mucking around things done "the old fashioned way" and without any true MVC structure. I assume it would be difficult for novice programmers to really understand what the advantages and best practices of MVC web frameworks are for, when they have little experience of having worked in anything else.