Pylons has served us pretty well in so far as it seems a more modular approach vs. django. Pylons encourages you to tweak the framework itself as you see fit. In our case, we incorporate a bunch of custom framework code. I'm sure you could do this with django, but it just feels better with a minimal, modular framework vs. something that is on the monolithic side of things.
Yes i agree, thats why when we were choosing our framework we ended up deciding between cherrypy and pylons ... i think turbogears changed from cherrypy to pylons as its core web framework module.
I think if needed you could change the framework code with django also but it just seems very large where as pylons or cherrypy is very minimilistic.