There are ways to "turn off" migrations [1] for testing. Also you can squash [2] your migrations which should help.
[1] http://stackoverflow.com/a/28560805/176611 [2] https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/1.8/topics/migrations/#squ...
[1] http://stackoverflow.com/a/28560805/176611 [2] https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/1.8/topics/migrations/#squ...
Turning off migrations is great in the cases it works, but it doesn't provide an easy way to also run the few data migrations that some parts of our code rely on. Obviously we could probably fix this in some non-DRY way, but I'd rather not.
The situation as is, is workable, but it would be way better to improve the performance of this a little (which I have a feeling is definitely possible). When I next get some time to work on this, I'll give it a crack.
For your testing, perhaps you might want to consider the `--keepdb` switch. Not very helpful when you're changing your models though.