Can I make Django admin reflect a hierarchy of models?

How is this a common situation? Consider the fact a model can have a virtually unlimited number of foreign key relationships, let alone visa versa. How would the admin 'know' how to represent this data the way a user requires without customizing things?

One would suggest you are used to work with content management systems rather than webframeworks (no pun intended). It's important to notice Django isn't a cms, but a webframework you can built on top of as you see fit. In a nutshell: 'Django is rather clueless and unaware of contextual requirements'.

Although the admin is quite a beast out-of-the-box, it can be hard to customize. There have been quite some discussions whether it should even be part of core. I can only suggest, if customizing things tends to get hacky, you should probably write your own 'admin', it's not that hard.

Are you sure you are not just looking at Django Admin Inline Models ?

There is no way that an automated admin will pick up your relationships, because in an RDBS there can be any number of foreign keys / one to one / many to many relations, and Django does not have a customized hierarchical behavior built in.

You can indeed edit the breadcrumb customizing an admin template if you want.

For relations you might also be interested into django MPTT that allows to make hierarchical model instances. Also see this question: Creating efficient database queries for hierarchical models (django) in that respect.