South provides stable and mature migrations for schema changes [1]
Custom Auth models are now available in Django 1.5 [2]
The templating language definitely needs some work, but it's slowly getting better. I'd prefer them drop in Jinja2 but that's just me.
[1] http://south.readthedocs.org/en/latest/
[2] https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/1.5/topics/auth/customizin...
Also, how about defaulting to bootstrap for the homely-looking admin app?
It seems to me that it does what it set out to do. Well.
If you want bootstrap BTW, this is a dropin addon https://github.com/riccardo-forina/django-admin-bootstrapped
Also, the admin app isn't supposed to be client-facing; it's a very effective but not-extremely-user-friendly way to view data without having to resort to SSH'ing in and running ORM queries on Django's CLI (or, worse, the database's CLI).
You can use it that way (and many of us have; I'm not innocent), but encouraging that with a pretty application of Bootstrap will likely give a lot of new developers the wrong idea on the tool's purpose.
The widgets are fine-looking, though increasingly dated. Why not outsource this work to someone who cares about it? Its community must dwarf Django's.
There's some truth to your statement about encouragement, but it reminds me of the phrase, don't "cut off your nose to spite your face." Plus, it isn't the author's place to dictate how the user will use it.
In the meantime, South still works quite well.