[arctangent]

You've caught a lot of flak for your statement.

With the knowledge I have now it would easy for me to say "and rightly so", but I think I can understand where you're coming from.

Django didn't always have schema migrations built in. I think they appeared in version 1.7 about 2 and a bit years ago. Before then there were separate add-on apps that could do migrations for you.

When Django added built-in support for migrations I still didn't use them for a while because at the time I was primarily a solo developer and wanted to have full control over what happened in the DB. And because I was a solo developer it didn't matter. So in that sense you're comment is in some ways correct.

However, in recent times I've started to work as part of a team. And that's where migrations really start to shine, because there might be several different people making app changes that result in DB schema changes. Django stores migration files with information about which other migrations each one is dependent upon.

Without that kind of migrations system it would simply be impossible for developers working on combinations of different branches of a development tree to build a working version of the code.