First, it's quite simple to replace Django's templating engine with Jinja. And second, Django's ORM isn't quite the equivalent of SQLAlchemy; the latter is supposed to be a true universal ORM, while the former is more limited, but focusing on the most important parts for a Web app.
> First, it's quite simple to replace Django's templating engine with Jinja.
Yes, it is. But most of the applications are tightly coupled with Django's ORM(auth, for eg, which I use very frequently), and in the end, I end up maintaining two types of templates which I don't like.
> And second, Django's ORM isn't quite the equivalent of SQLAlchemy;
No, it isn't. But SQLAlchemy does what django's orm does, and then some.
I would prefer a compartmentalized model, where a web framework doesn't implement templating or ORM, provided a robust solution exists. The templating engine and ORM should be independent libs, and the web framework should glue them together, possibly adding a declarative layer above them(render_to_response, declarative ORM etc).
