The money for migrations was to employ the guy who wrote south to work on those migrations fulltime. It wasn't as much of a "community" thing as one guy who did it all. That wasn't the django "community" but a single django contributor. I think you've got things a bit mixed up here. Overall, the core of django sholud be small. The real good stuff is in the reusable apps.

Besides, runserver isn't supposed to be for production. If you want things to run faster run it under a real wsgi server such as circus/chaussette, uwsgi, or gunicorn. That being said, I highly suggest looking into runserver_plus from: https://github.com/django-extensions/django-extensions, it is really nice stuff.