There is a large number of fairly clean well-documented extension points in the Django admin. You can override forms, templates, widgets, entire pages, querysets, search logic etc etc.
In the same way that the answer to questions about Django are often answered by "You're over-thinking it. It's just Python" - many questions about the Django admin can be answered by "You're over-thinking it. It's just Django"
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To take your example - it's fairly simple to incorporate the standard Django form wizard into a custom admin page: https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/1.4/ref/contrib/formtools/...
There is a large number of fairly clean well-documented extension points in the Django admin. You can override forms, templates, widgets, entire pages, querysets, search logic etc etc.
In the same way that the answer to questions about Django are often answered by "You're over-thinking it. It's just Python" - many questions about the Django admin can be answered by "You're over-thinking it. It's just Django"