I think there is plenty of other opinionated* people/groups in the Python web developer community to keep the Django community on their toes. For example, Flask which was mentioned in the slides we are currently discussing. Flask is from the same person/group that did Jinja, Werkzeug, and a couple other cool things. Pylons has a good user base and plenty of steam. There is also mavericks like Ian Bicking who wrote Webob and Paste (which Pylons is build on) who prefer the sans-framework approach because it is simple in Python to glue together the various libraries needed for a "framework".

Plus the addition of AppEngine with doesn't play nicely with Django due to BigTable means people look at other solutions.

Also, the Django community, especially some of the core developers do seem to respect the opinions of these other people and groups. I have seen in mailing lists and IRC where core devs agree that Django to a wrong turn here or there, but correcting that turn is a slow process. Overall, I think the philosophy of "Do it right, not right now" is a great one, and it needs to be considered with correcting mistakes.

Opinionated may not be the best term, but it is close. I really mean people that are vocal, that are respected in the community, and groups or projects that great support and communities.

*There are ways to use Django with AppEngine but all have issues. Also, AppEngine now has some sort of SQL support, but I haven't looked into it.