[adambratt]

I've found that the Django admin will usually only get you so far. After a certain point you really have to break out of the built-in change_list's etc to efficiently get what you need.

I still use the admin as a wrapper but for a lot of the views I've written my own handling.

[andybak]

I think we pretty much agree but I'd like to clarify as I often hear people argue something along the lines of "the admin is great for simple things but you'll have to write normal code for anything beyond simple CRUD"

In fact - you can slot custom functionality into the admin in so many ways that even with a highly custom set-up you're still getting a lot of benefit from using it.