Echoing the other poster here, I think it's naive to assume that it's failing due to a low-quality codebase for a variety of reasons. It's largely the same developers that brought us Django, but more to the point, even if it had the ugliest code base known to man, that wouldn't impact sales.

What they're likely running into is in trying to compete with 'good enough' blogging platforms. Ellington is positioned awkwardly outside the high end of consumer-grade blogging and well below the low end for most enterprise-class CMSes. The customers they have are elephants, and unless you have a specifically tailored sales team, elephant hunting is a very hard business to be in, especially for the kind of product that Ellington is, wherein it is not solving any core business needs for anybody except, probably, other newspapers and journals and the like.

Honestly if Djang is any indication of the development skills of the team I highly doubt the codebase is a huge mess. There are not many organizations where the development of an in-house tool spins off a high quality framework that becomes a mainstream tool.