I think it's a) really bizarre how invested you are in defending this obviously exploitative process -- do real work for us and then work for free for 3 months, sure, all the Django devs line up, it's easy game; and b) ridiculous the extent to which you are minimizing the requirements of the exercise. It's a code screen -- reasonable is making sure the candidate can write code, not that the candidate ships you a full stack functional product with a test suite and design pattern justification document. What is insane is trying to justify this with "its ok Django is basically magic lol". I don't think we have anything further to productively discuss.