Looking back on my first Django powered website and seeing how its code has evolved, I can almost pinpoint to the exact day that I really understood what Django is all about.
For me Django is about the loose coupling between a stand-alone application and a Django project. As the project evolved, the code was refactored to make use of some absolutely fantastic applications, and as my own code went to /dev/null, my website gained feature after feature. In a few hours I had tossed out my buggy code and replaced it with django-registration, django-contact-form and django.contrib.comments, and I was amazed.
Not only was the resulting code much, much cleaner, but I now had features that I previously did not think I wanted.
For me the key to really understanding Django was about making use of available code and experiencing how Django encourages the use of loosely coupled designs and code re-use.