While we were moving in that direction (upgrading apps, etc) we also launched Persona (BrowserID at the time). Some apps opted to switch to Persona, others opted to upgrade password storage mechanisms.
It mainly contains assertions for what one should do. Do you know if there's an explanation for the rationale anywhere? For example _"Passwords must be 8 characters or greater"_ or _"Privileged accounts - Password for privileged accounts should be rotated every: 90 to 120 days"_.
Not on hand, those decisions were made years ago, and done in email discussions and in person meetings.
That said, the password length requirements were driven by the cost of performing effective brute force attacks against properly hashed and salted values at the time we set that length.
Privileged passwords was basically a stop gap measure to ensure that users were refreshing passwords regularly. The correct solution is to deploy multi-factor authentication.
MDN was on Django 1.2 for a while, albeit with monkeypatched password hashing (since Django at the time was still defaulting to SHA1, I believe). With the switch to Persona, it no longer matters -- for a new account -- what hasher is used, since Persona doesn't involve storing a password.