Trying to turn Django development into a cookie cutter process seems silly.
Do it your own way. Learn it. Understand it. Django is a magical and powerful beast that can be used in many wonderful ways.
Where "works for you" the vast majority of the time really just means "the model fits your needs" (that is, username that fits the validator, non-unique email addresses, and so forth).
Don't get me wrong, I'm really grateful for contrib.auth, I just find myself butting heads with it fairly often.
To recommend it as something you should do when you make a Django app is bad advice, particularly for the beginners, who will just be confused by the extra steps.
I recommend anyone who isn't familiar with Django simply do the "My First App" tutorial. After that, the dev will find their own way, and I doubt it will be much like yours, or mine.
http://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/topics/auth/#other-auth...
I agree that it's an absurd recommendation, however.