I think the advantage with tools like celery is that it deals with the many different failure scenarios pretty well. It's kind of like jQuery's ajax. Of course

I think the advantage with tools like celery is that it deals with the many different failure scenarios pretty well. It's kind of like jQuery's ajax. Of course you can figure out how to make a simple replacement. But then you have to manage the 100 different edge cases for when your code doesn't go down the happy path. Much easier to write a simple task queue that's good enough than a replacement for $.ajax, though...