I think the django admin is quite an accomplishment of software engineering and functionality. The amount of functionality you can build quickly is impressive. Sure it might not have the slickest UI, but a lot of those slick frontend features in modern UIs have half thought out semantics and take ages to implement vs django. Django lets you concentrate on the actual business problem , but becomes painful to do extreme customization on. There are multiple styling extensions for django that help.

I think there is Trader UI, and VC UI. Trader UI, built for wall st packs every bit of information into every pixel possible. VC UI has rounded corners, nice fonts, drop shadows and half the information on the screen. Django UI actually splits the difference nicely.