[andrewgodwin]

You're free to use Django without the template language - that's a relatively simple replacement and one we're looking into making even easier.

The ORM/SQLAlchemy is a more difficult issue. To some extent, Django _is_ its ORM, and making that modular is extremely difficult. You can remove the ORM, but you'll obviously lose everything on top of it - admin, migrations, generic views, etc.

I personally believe that while the ORM is not as configurable as SQLAlchemy, that's one of its strengths; having a relatively fixed target makes writing things that rely on it a lot easier (migrations would have been much harder given SQLAlchemy as a base, for example).