Django bills itself as "the web framework for perfectionists with deadlines". As a logical part of that, Django is always working to improve itself, as are probably almost all frameworks. For people with actively developed applications (perfectionists or otherwise), this is fine. They are working on their app anyway, constantly making other changes and improvements and adjustments, so time and Django updates will deliver a continue stream of improvements (along with a certain amount of changes they have to make to keep up, but again they're already making changes).

This does not describe our goals or what we do with our web application. What we want is to write our app, reach a point where it's essentially complete (which we pretty much achieved a while ago), and then touch it only on the rare occasions when there are changes in the requirements. Django provides what we need in terms of features (and someone has to write that code), but it doesn't and never will provide the stability that we also want. Neither sharks nor frameworks for perfectionists ever stand still.

This creates an awkward mismatch between what Django wants us to do and what we want to do, one that I have unfortunately spent years not realizing and understanding. In particular, from our perspective the work of keeping up with Django's changes and evolution is almost pure overhead. Our web application is running fine as it is, but every so often we need to go change it in order to nominally have security fixes available, and in completely unsurprising news I'm not very enthusiastic or active about doing this (not any more, at least; I was in the beginning). The latest change we need is an especially large amount of work, as we will have to move from Python 2 to Python 3.

(We don't need bug fixes because we aren't running into bugs. If we were, we probably would have to work around them anyway rather than wait for a new Django release.)

I don't know what the solution is, or even if there is a solution (especially at this point, with our application already written for Django). I expect that other frameworks (in any language) would have the same bias towards evolution and change that Django does; most users of them, especially big active ones, are likely people who have applications that are being actively developed on a regular basis. I suspect that 'web frameworks for people who want to write their app and then walk away from it' is not a very big niche, and it's not likely to be very satisfying for open source developers to work on.

(Among other structural issues, as a developer you don't get to do anything. You write your framework, fix the bugs, and then people like me want to you stop improving things.)

PS: I don't think this necessarily means that we made a bad choice when we picked Django way back when, because I'm not sure there was a better choice to be made. Writing our web app was clearly the right choice (it has saved us so much time and effort over the years), and using a framework made that feasible.