[batiste]

For once a fair criticism of Django by someone who seems to know the framework well.

I don't quite share the same experience with i18n though. I always found Django statical code analysis to extract translation keys to be superior in many ways to other translation systems. It is giving useful context that are stored in the PO files and good translation tools use them. I also never had any issue with string based keys. You can chose an english based key or an abstract whatever you prefer.

Some of the annoyance you mentioned, that I agree completely, are more of a language issue like: reloader, or dependency management.

For multiple environments there is a very simple pattern you can put in place using an environment variable and conditional imports. something like:

  from settings.base import *
  
  if env == 'prod':
    from settings.prod import *