I think you were looking for http://djangopackages.com/ Makes it very easy to find out which packages are actively maintained (also - just see which ones have recent commits on Github!)
And remember some projects have little activity because they were born perfect :)
And I actively reached out too, went to the IRC room, went to the forums, read the mailing list. And it feels dead, most blog posts with tutorials are years old and obsolete, there most of the applications we've tried to incorporate use deprecated methods. Its a real pain in the ass.
Not to mention the applications are all over the place, just look at this list https://code.djangoproject.com/wiki/DjangoResources#Djangoap... it has lots of components but most of the "suggested" are not on there? Even worse is that most of those links are to dead projects with no activity.
I would go with Flask, Bottle, or tornado and if you need an ORM go with sqlalchemy or Mongo.
/rant sorry its been a hard few months.