The apps stuff is dead on, even Drupal does this better (but they have their own problems), the "Design decision needed" and "wontfix" attitude is another one of those 'signals to the community', for the most part the community is forced to patch the django core after each release in order to keep going.

It's a pity, django could go a lot faster than it does. I would not be surprised at all to see a mambo / joomla style fork happening to django if the core team does not heed these warnings.