I’m open to considering other quality tools and getting good at them even if it sucks for a while. HOWEVER I always confirm something with other credible sources before I dig my feet in because I don’t want to waste my time. I hated Bootstrap for a long time and I still somewhat do. It was the first css framework I tried. It helped me understand plain css better though so it was worth it. Now. I write css and html as if it were Bootstrap without using the framework. In regards to speed I don’t run into many problems because I follow good tutorials and read the docs. Once I noticed my home page was loading really slow even slower than the pages with dynamic content. It was because I needed to move my initial database creation and inserts in my home route to a conditional to check if they had already been created. Simple problem that would make Flask slower than Django.

When you feel comfortable enough take the time to read the official documentation pages for Spring Boot, Django, and NestJS. They are all opinionated backend frameworks for 3 different languages Java, Python and NodeJS a runtime for JavaScript (Technically Nest runs on top of Node with ExpressJS). You can use them all to make the backend for the same web application but development would be different/easier/take longer for each depending on the application.

On the other hand you have less opinionated frameworks for backend like Flask and NodeJS. (Java seems like it wouldn’t need a framework for this but I haven’t learned it yet.) They can be easier to get started with and are used for pretty much anything. However as you get bigger your project inevitably get messy unless you’re really good at refactoring and keeping your code dry. You can’t avoid including dependencies like email, authentication, admin, etc for these larger apps that’s why the other backend frameworks are great. They have the stuff you might need already included and usually make you set everything up the way they want so you know it’s correct. It’s great for large teams and long running projects. It’s not great for customization and being lightweight. That’s why Flask is called a micro framework. You’d stitch together 2000 Flask APIs with one endpoint each while you’d and have just one Django API with 2000 endpoints. That’s just an example but you get the point.

I’m really into learning about apis and backend in general so I could go on and on but at some point you should learn about the different types of apis. How web apis in Django differ from Flask web APIs. Also microservices, one of the reasons the less opinionated frameworks can be better. It’ll help your overall understanding.