I think you are being a bit harsh by using the quickness of Django as a 1 line throwaway - the entire purpose is for it to produce quick, simple applications.
There is an entire class of problems (mainly enterprise-related) for which the simplicity (ORM / Auth / etc..) is great. I managed to tie Django Auth into Active Directory which made the user's experience (relatively) seamless, as opposed to the previous reality (everyone with a different password for different applications).
Can't you also use Jinja templates in Django?
I'm not convinced that I would use Django on a large project where I get to cooperate with 15-20 other programmers, but if the scenario is 3 people with relatively normal business requirements it makes a lot of sense.
You can use Jinja2 with Django, but you lose the ability to use any prebuilt Django templates. Which isn't much of an issue in practice since those are often the first thing you write yourself from reusable apps.
You also can't use templatetags from reusable apps (or Django itself) but it's easy enough to write a wrapper for those that allows you to.
We switched to Jinja2 for Canvas because the Django templates were atrociously slow, and it was absolutely the right decision for us.
There is an entire class of problems (mainly enterprise-related) for which the simplicity (ORM / Auth / etc..) is great. I managed to tie Django Auth into Active Directory which made the user's experience (relatively) seamless, as opposed to the previous reality (everyone with a different password for different applications).
Can't you also use Jinja templates in Django?
I'm not convinced that I would use Django on a large project where I get to cooperate with 15-20 other programmers, but if the scenario is 3 people with relatively normal business requirements it makes a lot of sense.
YMMV.