I have been using django for web development for almost a year now, and I just recently started using South to do database migrations. To be fair, most of the work that I have been doing with databases has centered around MongoDB and schema-less document stores instead of a traditional RDBMS. Since Django does not come with any database migration tools, my standard approach was to make sure that my models are completely thought out before running the manage.py syncdb command. The lack of a good database migration tool was one of the things that originally had turned me off to django.