I'd say the admin app already looks a bit like Bootstrap, and it's hard to claim either in its default form is more or less "homely" than the other. Granted, I like both.

Also, the admin app isn't supposed to be client-facing; it's a very effective but not-extremely-user-friendly way to view data without having to resort to SSH'ing in and running ORM queries on Django's CLI (or, worse, the database's CLI).

You can use it that way (and many of us have; I'm not innocent), but encouraging that with a pretty application of Bootstrap will likely give a lot of new developers the wrong idea on the tool's purpose.

I think keeping it ugly does Django a disservice. People associate the hideous yellow on cyan header with it and might think ... oh that rails/node stuff looks more professional (less like it was created by 90's-IT-guy). No matter that the issues are orthogonal, people aren't aware of the nuances.

The widgets are fine-looking, though increasingly dated. Why not outsource this work to someone who cares about it? Its community must dwarf Django's.

There's some truth to your statement about encouragement, but it reminds me of the phrase, don't "cut off your nose to spite your face." Plus, it isn't the author's place to dictate how the user will use it.

What's happening is that low-level APIs for manipulating the database schema are being worked on, and will become part of Django. Then, many types of tools -- including migration tools -- will be able to be built on top of those APIs.

In the meantime, South still works quite well.

bootstrap is horrible and your suggestion doesn't address the problem.

The only problems I've had with the admin is that it's very model based, while my user actions don't neccesarily reflect specific models.

If you want bootstrap BTW, this is a dropin addon https://github.com/riccardo-forina/django-admin-bootstrapped

Bootstrap is ideal for internal admin interfaces

This is what I use it for, almost exclusively, and it works great for that purpose.

We don't have to solve every problem simultaneously.

Could you elaborate about what is horrible with Bootstrap?

It seems to me that it does what it set out to do. Well.