[SoftwareMaven]

Completely replacing the template system with Jinja is silly (no idea if this is what they did) since it significantly reduces the value of the Django ecosystem. Far better it to use jinja for your work, but leave the Django templates for Django and all the other apps you integrate to use. I do with Django would reduce their stance on no expressions in the templates. Sometimes it saves a lot of work to just be able to call a function or add two numbers together without needing to build a filter or tag every time.

I've been happy with django-jinja[1] for that purpose. It replaces the context processors so it will load jinja templates if they have a .jinja extension and Django if they are .html. It also includes the django filters in jinja-land.

The ORM is more problematic. I just started a project a couple months ago and thought a lot about ditching the default ORM in favor of SqlAlchemy. I decided not to, for the reason of expedience and, as the TFA mentions, it already leaks. So, I stuck with the Django ORM and will drop to SQL directly if need be (need being defined by the ORM making the code confusing or there being performance hotspots).

1. https://github.com/niwibe/django-jinja