It seems that its support for SQLAlchemy isn't really first class. I'm sure its builtin ORM is workable for simple web apps, but if you are doing serious databa

It seems that its support for SQLAlchemy isn't really first class. I'm sure its builtin ORM is workable for simple web apps, but if you are doing serious database work in python, there is no substitute for SQLAlchemy. Of course, you can use whatever other libraries you want in your own code, but at the point where you are not using Django's ORM and you have left its lame template system for something like mako (or maybe genshi, especially if you are generating XML), then what is Django really giving you?