I can't speak to DRF, but strongly disagree about Django. While it's reasonably nice on the outside, the internals are a bunch of cruft, interconnectedness, indirection, "magic", and simply too much of everything. There are all sorts of very understandable reasons for that, but the fact remains: almost never did a quick look through the code answer a question I had about Django. That's a big reason why I love Tornado; it's fairly minimal and straightforward. If the documentation doesn't cover something, the answer is mostly just a few clicks away.