Amusingly, my must-have Django packages are mostly things that replace large chunks of Django (Jinja2 for templates, a DB connector/ORM for whatever database the project needs, which even for PostgreSQL is often plain SQLAlchemy).
I guess I'll just use flask.py or something for my next project. This is not meant as criticism, just my personal experience.
Yep, having everything built-in is a double-edge sword.
I myself love Django, though I find some parts of it a bit over-engineered (in the Java style). That is changing for the better in recent releases though. I'm thinking the render_to_response stuff and management commands, etc.
I guess I'll just use flask.py or something for my next project. This is not meant as criticism, just my personal experience.