Django Opinions

Seeing this a year late. For what it's worth:

I've developed over 40 web applications in Django over the years.

I would describe it as "full-featured". I've worked with bloated frameworks before, and don't consider Django to be that. It is closer to "bloated" than "thin" though.

It can handle a lot of traffic without problems. However, it depends on the skill of the developer. It's possible to build a slow website in any framework. If you tell me the degree of traffic you are expecting, I can give more pointed feedback.

Django is most useful for a website/webapp that is somewhat complex (think a member site, or more complex than a standard landing page, etc.) The extra features Django has over thinner frameworks enable more rapid development. Good programmer time is expensive, so this matters. I've also chosen to use it for very simple websites, simply because I'm able to be quickly productive in it. It's technically overkill (i.e. bloated) for something like that, but not necessarily a reason not to use it, UNLESS you expect extremely high traffic levels for the kind of server you want to host it on.

If your developer suggests Django, ask if they've used it before. If they are indeed experienced in the framework, they will bring that experience into your project - so they'll develop faster and higher quality, compared to if you ask them to use a framework they're less familiar with. That might be why they're suggesting it.

That does not mean you ought to go with it. For example, it uses the Python language. If everything else you've been doing uses PHP, it might make more sense to be consistent and choose a PHP framework instead.

I'm in the process of deploying my first website using django and I find the learning curve difficult to overcome. There's just barely enough documentation to keep the process moving mostly thanks to stack overflow. I'm hoping it doesn't take me two weeks again to deploy something like nav-tags again. Good luck. Definately a scalable platform.