I find django's level of complexity just about right. It has a lot of built-in things that you might not need in every case, but they might come handy some of the times. But what makes me stick with django is that it is low level enough to allow me to build whatever I want while smoothing the process.
I would call Django everything but low-level. Tornado, Twisted.Web and (possibly) CherryPy are low-level, Flask, Bottle, Web.py and other micro-frameworks I consider mid-level and Django, Pyramid and other "full-stack" frameworks are definitely high-level.
And Django's complexity is really good in it's class. "Complex is better than complicated" - and Django tries hard not to be the latter :)
I usually just route a json request to a python function and send a response. And I've found the ORM which would be the most high level part of it to do everything I've needed to do which without tweaking anything.
And you're doing this utilizing Django's urlconf machinery?! With all it's support for deeply nested hierarchies of urls, passing keyword and other arguments extracted from url (and/or just supplied), supplying views as strings instead of function objects etc, not to mention setting settings.py up?
Look, I know that bare-bones Django looks simple, but in reality it isn't. You don't even have "bare-bones" unless you manually disable quite some functionality in settings.py. It's still good if you plan to grow your app. You can always turn the features back on and plug reusable apps with ease.
But for something as simple as getting JSON requests, hitting db and returning response I'd choose something else, some microframework and simplified ORM, for example Bottle and Storm[1]. I had a great success with using CorePost[2] on top of Twisted, but that's only if you can live without an ORM and like Twisted's brand of async.
Long story short: there is no need to employ Django for every little webservice. You can, of course, but you should think about why your using full-stack framework when something simpler, faster and smaller would do just as well.
I understand what you're saying. Is that kind of magic that makes effortless the making of these simple things. And that's what's expected in a framework. But you are right, when compared to other smaller python frameworks django turns out as more complex. But let's say, compared to other frameworks like .NET for example, django stays in a lower which I like and I don't need more.
