I have a different philosophy. If some functionality is offered by a good-quality (supported, good docs etc) django package then go on and use it. If you want t

I have a different philosophy. If some functionality is offered by a good-quality (supported, good docs etc) django package then go on and use it. If you want to be DRY you shouldn't re-implement functionality that others have already implemented. Also, after you use a package you more or less learn it and it's easy to re-use it in your next project -- while if you implement your own solution you'll most probably need to resort to horrendous copy and paste from your old project to your new one to re-use it! Also, as I already mention in my article, if you use a package and you use it for its intented purpose you have a quick reference for some of your project's functionality (f.e if you use django-waffle then you'll know that some parts of the project can be enabled or disabled at will) - if instead you had implemented everything yourself you (or the person that needs to understand your project) would need to read everything to know what's happening. So, for me, using a good django package does not add but actually removes complexity from your project! I can't remember any package incompatibilities - instead as I already mention in my article there are a lot of packages that work great together (django-tables with django-filter, django-rest-framework with django-filter, django-taggit with django-autocomplete-light etc). Finally, I partially agree with your comment about more pain when upgrading django versions however considering that - supported projects are usually upgraded a little after a new version of django is out (most of them are already prepared before the new django version is out since they can be tested using the beta version) - django keeps supporting (non LTS) old versions for 8 months (and 16 months for securiy fixes) so in this time most probably all your dependecies will have updated so as to support the new django version - all packages are open source so you can contribute to help move to the next version the upgrading pain should be very little... When I upgraded from django 1.10 to 1.11 I also upgraded all the packages I describe in the list and everything worked without problems!