I guess it's a nice way to visualize the models, at least in the beginning. I prefer shell_plus along with dbshell. Then I can also write code that I can later easily adapt into my views etc.

It's invaluable in many ways for me and my clients and it's saved me countless hours of developing things from scratch.

I think the animosity towards "over use" by some of the core community is misguided. The continued work that goes towards improving extensibility and features is surely a sign that someone finds it worth contributing towards. And the number of projects on Github or Django Packages that hook into the admin have to be written by somebody.