Uhh, just finished a week's intensive training in a supposed to make stuff more rapid .net based framework, and coming from a Django / Code igniter / Ruby on Rails / Grails background I'm utterly stunned that anyone would claim that the basic asp.net environment is a productivity boost over a top of the line MVC framework like Django?

Maybe the problem is your competence rather than your tools? I don't mean to be blatantly offensive, but wow, asp.net > django? Really? ... Man..

Always be careful when talking about something that you only have one day's exposure to. I was pretty slow my first day of writing Django/Python too, but I stuck with it.

6 months later I was quite fast, and could compare apples-apples the things that Django doesn't quite do as quickly or elegantly as our home-rolled ASP.NET framework (which, to be fair, has been in development a lot longer than Django.)

So yes, having given both sides a decent shot, I went back to ASP.NET. As I said above, your mileage may vary. But until you've put in the time to build something big with .NET and get fully up to speed, you'll never know if you're right.

Ah, so you actually built some other framework on top of ASP.net and that's homegrown and that might be better for your purposes than something like django, that's a fair bit more believable.

You make cool stuff, I wish you all the best with it, catch you at a beach retreat some day. :)