I do think this is both a strength and a weakness. Admin interfaces and plugins/apps are great to get you up and running fast (this is similar to the scaffolding point above), but they are also the part of any ecosystem which introduces subtle bugs and dependencies.
By the time you get to crud admin and plugins, you're at the point where the benefits of the framework start to come with significant additional costs (in maintenance, flexibility, comprehension etc). A pre-built app or plugin gets you up and running quickly but when you start to modify it you really need to understand the entire app/plugin before you can do so efficiently. Often people feel this is as significant a roadblock as simply writing it from scratch in the first place.
Any complex webapp is probably going to outgrow standard admin/scaffolding, and any complex usage is going to require modifications of things like plugins and gems, so while they're nice to have in an ecosystem I don't see them as essential. This is an area where django has more built-in that say rails though, and it'd be interesting to see a Golang framework trying to take the best ideas from all these other popular frameworks.
I disagree with that, they made the Django admin interface really easy to extend, and entirely pluggable. If you don't like any part of Django, you can roll your own, while using the Django-provided functionality until yours is ready.
I would agree if the components were tightly coupled, but Django is very well structured to let you substitute any component. At any rate, it's much better than writing everything yourself outright, and I'm speaking as someone who has launched more than 10 Django-based products.
By the time you get to crud admin and plugins, you're at the point where the benefits of the framework start to come with significant additional costs (in maintenance, flexibility, comprehension etc). A pre-built app or plugin gets you up and running quickly but when you start to modify it you really need to understand the entire app/plugin before you can do so efficiently. Often people feel this is as significant a roadblock as simply writing it from scratch in the first place.
Any complex webapp is probably going to outgrow standard admin/scaffolding, and any complex usage is going to require modifications of things like plugins and gems, so while they're nice to have in an ecosystem I don't see them as essential. This is an area where django has more built-in that say rails though, and it'd be interesting to see a Golang framework trying to take the best ideas from all these other popular frameworks.