if you end up deciding you want to step slightly off the garden path and do things juussssst a little differently than Django wants you to, you're probably gonna have a bad time.

Yep! I am using Flask + SQLAlchemy so I can have an orchestration layer that handles all the business logic, and just takes in my Flask app, Celery app, and database sessions as dependencies. I don't know if there's an equivalent way to do that in Django. If there is, it seems like it would be more trouble than it is worth.