What do you use instead?
The Pyramid tutorial has you sending responses to the browser, which is so low-level I would hope the framework is more flexible than Django.
EDIT: While I'm responding, I'll also note that if you're running into speed issues with your templating language, you've waited too long to setup a decent caching layer. (Hello, Varnish)
Once one is past the honeymoon period of Django, for non-cookie cutter projects, Pyramid's very well suited for that "advanced" project where you find yourself fighting Django.
Most of the default building blocks are very sensible and if you need to decouple them (in extreme use cases), it's not that hard.