As someone who's built a few apps in flask that have gotten quite big (but still maintenable), I am curious to get your perspective on how big a difference Rails gives - I have explored ASP.net and Django as options before for projects and immediately (probably out of naivete) concluded that even for simple apps I'll have to start modding the behavior of the components sufficiently enough that it will give me a headache.
Hence I have generally stuck to using Flask and just quickly building a custom version of any component that doesn't directly cause any security issues. Thoughts? Am I wasting my time ?
Coming from Rails, I spent some time with Django and Flask applications in the last few years. There are noticeable differences between the two of them but both are much lower level than Rails. The developer has more choices and can make more mistakes. Projects can look totally different.
On the other side all Rails projects look pretty much the same and this make onboarding much simpler.
To answer your question: you're probably wasting customer's money (unless you're the customer) by implementing your custom components. You should use as many existing components as you can find: they are probably better engineered (dozens of teams at work vs one person - that included bug reports), better documented and maintained and will live longer. Then you have to adapt much like we adapt buying stock cloths, furniture, etc. But it's cheaper, faster to deliver and usually good enough.
basically less available gem/packages for Flask, and when available less quality or less plug and play.
The difference is felt especially when doing basic stuff that most web app needs such as auth, routings, request/response parsing/building, etc.
Even for things like user authentication system with session management, etc. in Rails with Devise you add Devise to your gem file (1 loc) then run `rails generate devise:install` and you basically have an auth system with sessions, login, etc. We are talking a few minutes and boom, your app has a fully auth system.
Hence I have generally stuck to using Flask and just quickly building a custom version of any component that doesn't directly cause any security issues. Thoughts? Am I wasting my time ?