[OJFord]

That's pretty much what I was describing in my initial reply to your top-level comment that would be an improvement, just not built in.

Ideally though I'd like a tool with first class declarative schema as the source of truth - migrations that Django can correctly autogenerate don't need to concern me at all; if I need to vary them or resolve some ambiguity in a possible path (renamed a column vs. dropped and added one, for a simple example) then there can be some way of specifying that migration. Essentially as Django targets its models as the intended result of migrations (and complains of a missing migration if they don't get there, etc.) I'd prefer instead to target SQL schema. Still check ORM consistency - but against the schema, not the migrations of it.

Starting from scratch it seems obvious that you'd have the schema, and the mapping into python models. Django does away with the former by inference, but in so doing limits its scope to the subset of possibly desired SQL that it understands.

If you have SQL and Python, then you can have DSL for the understood subset without losing migrations, tracking in a single place, etc. of the rest. You could also give Django ownership of the entire database/schema, so that any manual experiments/adjustments would be blown away on migration, they'd have to be documented in code to be persisted.