The point I was making was with regard to the article, which goes down on Django because it would supposedly not be barebones enough. I was expliciting that although one does an apparently monolithic
(easy_install|pip install) django, one can readily use only the project+url+view part and have something as barebones as Flask in which you could use other components. Additionally you could readily use only Django templates or the Django ORM, and use e.g Flask for the view part (or no view part at all if you're not doing web stuff)
As for the comparison with Rails, faking models is the same in Django, as both leverage duck-typing features of their underlying language. In Django, a model is just a class, and many things are just queried via introspection. Many parts just query model_instance.pk. Additionally populating Model.meta and you even get yourself some deeper model introspection features. To me the true important part of ActiveRecord, ActiveModel and ActiveSupport is rather that you have a set of modules that you can readily include/extend into your fake models to inject complete model behavior, and that is something Django lacks.
You name the example of link helpers, and interestingly this is an example of the difference of philosophy between Rails and Django (see [0]). Django parts are coupled more loosely than Rails parts, a possible rationale being that creating coupling between two distant parts such as URLs and models could enforce constraints on each, thus reducing their potential to independently shine and coercing possible alternatives of each to the provided model. Another example: with Django you explicitly create a request object (whether directly constructed or encapsulated into a helper method) to be returned by the view function while Rails does magic for you in the controller.
Interestingly you bring the problem of forms and this is again an area where Rails and Django differ. Rails wants both form and data to be handled by a single model, whereas Django separates form models and data models. The rationale here is that they are two different problems and that they ought to be solved by two different components (yet they share a great deal of similarity, and code).
FWIW I worked extensively with both (although my current job is in a Ruby shop, I worked with Django at my previous job and since I'm more of a Python guy I keep myself up to date on that front too), and am in no way saying that one is better than the other. Choose what works for you.
[0] http://stackoverflow.com/questions/61451/does-django-have-ht...