Yeah it should be noted that all of the referenced decisions we made around web frameworks in this thread predate django's 1.0 release. I think I was comparing pylons to django 0.96 iirc, and in 2005 when aaron wrote web.py, I don't think django was on anybody's radar (or at least it wasn't on ours).
You're right. Settings are not even necessary in my example, as we should be fine with defaults in most cases. The only lines you really need are these four:
from django.conf import settings
settings.configure(ROOT_URLCONF='polls')
from django.core.wsgi import get_wsgi_application
application = get_wsgi_application()
You lose some of the Django niceties (like being able to provide your own custom settings on the command-line) but flask doesn't have them anyway.
A single-file web application in Django: https://github.com/mstepniowski/microdjango/blob/master/poll...