I am sorry, but I am still failing to see your point. Let me address the specifics issues you brought up:
Accessing the request object? In Django, there is a RequestContext that can be accessed all over the place (e.g. middleware, views, templates or wherever else you wish to pass it through). It has many helper methods that parse several thing only one method call away.
The template engine? I have used Jinja in some projects with Django. It literally takes less than five lines of code to swap out. Look it up.
The Django ORM? Don't make the calls. I have done a handful of projects where doing everything through the ORM would have been a really bad decision since the web app was mostly about being a front end for an analytics system with processing that took from hours to days to complete. Instead, I wrote raw PostgreSQL/PostGIS SQL queries all over the place that ran asynchronous and hooked up Hadoop Clusters for other items... everything being controlled through django-celery. It was really easy to do. The state currently uses it to do "serious" pollution, health and city growth analysis, hence why I fail to see your point.
You mentioned Sinatra/Flask/Pyramid and such. Thore are good frameworks, but you also acknowledge that there are "smaller communities in few cases" and my point is that is exactly where django shines: the ecosystem.
I like to build "new serious platforms", too. To do that, I use whatever is appropriate from Django and the community and I have yet to stumble upon something that keeps me stuck because of the decision I made.
Granted, it is a hammer and sometimes you need a drill. Let me give you an example: One of the apps I needed to write is a realtime geolocation service. For that, I use websockets and node.js because of its non-blocking and persisted connection nature. Does that mean that I need to ditch Django altogether? Hell no, I let the front reverse proxy direct the websocket traffic to node.js and the rest to django. My node.js code is so tiny because it is just a Pub/Sub client proxy. Most of the work is done in async Celery/RabbitMQ workers (that use the Django ORM by the way). Doing this with Django is easy (well, to be fair, the credit should go to the vast amount of python libraries).
I "believe [in Django] technically"... why? Because in the four years I have been using it I have yet to get stuck because of my decision to pick it. I don't use it for everything, but I do for 99% of web related work. Once again to the risk of repeating myself, I pick and choose the Django parts I need in a per-project basis. Funny enough, I still laugh everytime somebody complains about some performance thing and I pretty much see their face jaw drop to the ground when I install varnish in front, change two lines of code to tweak the expiration headers, and deploy the static content with a good CDN. 5x performance is not surprising. Yes, there are several Django apps that make this trivial to do.
Sorry I still don't see the specifics of the points you are trying to make.
Accessing the request object? In Django, there is a RequestContext that can be accessed all over the place (e.g. middleware, views, templates or wherever else you wish to pass it through). It has many helper methods that parse several thing only one method call away.
The template engine? I have used Jinja in some projects with Django. It literally takes less than five lines of code to swap out. Look it up.
The Django ORM? Don't make the calls. I have done a handful of projects where doing everything through the ORM would have been a really bad decision since the web app was mostly about being a front end for an analytics system with processing that took from hours to days to complete. Instead, I wrote raw PostgreSQL/PostGIS SQL queries all over the place that ran asynchronous and hooked up Hadoop Clusters for other items... everything being controlled through django-celery. It was really easy to do. The state currently uses it to do "serious" pollution, health and city growth analysis, hence why I fail to see your point.
You mentioned Sinatra/Flask/Pyramid and such. Thore are good frameworks, but you also acknowledge that there are "smaller communities in few cases" and my point is that is exactly where django shines: the ecosystem.
I like to build "new serious platforms", too. To do that, I use whatever is appropriate from Django and the community and I have yet to stumble upon something that keeps me stuck because of the decision I made.
Granted, it is a hammer and sometimes you need a drill. Let me give you an example: One of the apps I needed to write is a realtime geolocation service. For that, I use websockets and node.js because of its non-blocking and persisted connection nature. Does that mean that I need to ditch Django altogether? Hell no, I let the front reverse proxy direct the websocket traffic to node.js and the rest to django. My node.js code is so tiny because it is just a Pub/Sub client proxy. Most of the work is done in async Celery/RabbitMQ workers (that use the Django ORM by the way). Doing this with Django is easy (well, to be fair, the credit should go to the vast amount of python libraries).
I "believe [in Django] technically"... why? Because in the four years I have been using it I have yet to get stuck because of my decision to pick it. I don't use it for everything, but I do for 99% of web related work. Once again to the risk of repeating myself, I pick and choose the Django parts I need in a per-project basis. Funny enough, I still laugh everytime somebody complains about some performance thing and I pretty much see their face jaw drop to the ground when I install varnish in front, change two lines of code to tweak the expiration headers, and deploy the static content with a good CDN. 5x performance is not surprising. Yes, there are several Django apps that make this trivial to do.
Sorry I still don't see the specifics of the points you are trying to make.