> If you need a piece of functionality
Depends what you mean by "need". Often when you need a piece of functionality, what you actually "need" is a small subset of what a third party app is wanting to provide, and I've often found simply using out-of-the-box apps for this adds a fairly huge amount of complexity that is just not needed.
My favourite case in point would be adding very simple blog functionality to something - which is fairly quick & trivial in django, but out-of-the-box blog solutions promote themselves with tempting-features-that-you-dont-really-need that inadvertently add a lot of complexity and before you know it you're a few releases down the line and you realize that the author doesn't really know how to use South properly and your db ends up in a slight migration-state-limbo forevermore.
Though note that I am _not_ saying don't use external dependencies - I use several of those listed in the article (I am a big fan of django-reversion) - but remember to look at everything with a critical eye before inclusion.
> This just smells of FUD to me
It's all very well and good saying that but a stack of previous bad experiences doesn't smell like FUD when you're on this end of them.