Short answer: nope. As you identified everything is so tied to the models you aren’t left with much that makes Django worth using. I think there are old discus

Short answer: nope. As you identified everything is so tied to the models you aren’t left with much that makes Django worth using. I think there are old discussions on the Django core dev mailing list about supporting alternative ORMs like the template engines in a pluggable fashion but it would be so much work. I’ve actually been quite happy with the Django ORM and I’ve dropped out of it to do raw SQL when I’ve needed Postgres features that weren’t supported.