No, neither of these is what people have asked for over and over..
This is actually one of the banal examples of Django's broken process. For an interesting read on it all, check out this thread. No fundamental downsides given, yet it languishes forever more.
Seeing as I know that thread pretty well, I'm not sure I agree with your characterization; for example, the first couple replies from committers raise a valid point about whether it's a necessary feature given what Django already offers. Later replies go into specific questions about use cases, technical issues, etc., and honestly that's the way it should be.
Meanwhile, for all the people who are apparently up in arms about this feature, only one's ever bothered to put a patch on the ticket, and the patch is three years old and has technical problems that I brought up in the email thread. That's not the way to get a feature into Django, as far as I'm concerned.
Given the ease of implementation of many of the feature requests I see on the django lists and the (seemingly) critical nature or large inconvenience described by the requestees there is an annoying lack of patches.
This is a problem that most OSS projects suffer from and I think the change in tack goes some way to addressing this problem. Certainly I am going to go and finish off my patches and start trying to get them accepted. I feel more confident that putting the work in is going to be worth my time as the processes are being improved to get them committed and I won't have to go on maintaining a fork forever and ever.
