[babul]

If Pinax is such a pain, can anyone make any recommendations on what to use/do if you did want to build a social-networking site using Django?

[alanthonyc]

Roll your own.

There are lots of projects (including Pinax) that you can reference to help you figure out how to do things yourself.

http://djangoplugables.com/

...is a site that lists django related projects. You can also just google stuff. There are a bunch more on Google Code and on github.