[rat9988]

I don't see any tribal knowledge being passed on here. It seems django's admin panel is ugly because nobody has interest, enough, in investing to make it beautiful. And you were looking for a fancy answer with wisdom as "it's to discourage its use for consumer blabla" while the obvious answer is the right one. It's ugly and there isn't enough interest to change it, because it works well enough to cover the intended usecases. The other usecases would need more investment, and nobody invested.

[hombre_fatal]

It’s also really hard to change look and feel in a mature product. You have to have a good vision and then fight against a horde of people who have their own ideas, resist change, or will bike shed you into submission. And you need to have good taste and design principles to begin with; it has to be a real upgrade. And it has to be worth it.

You don’t just submit a pull request called “Redesign”. The with is more political and organizational in nature

[ThibWeb]

I see three quotes from past contributors in the article, that seems like valuable knowledge to me? Anecdotally as someone who contributes to the Django admin I see the interest is there. I’d say it being clunky is for other reasons (for example there being more back-end developers contributing to the project than other skillsets).

[regularfry]

I think there's also the aspect that it wasn't built with ever being restyled in mind. It looks fiddly to make changes to (even if it actually might not be), so people don't feel inclined to dig in.