We keep all the deployment stuff in source control anyway. For me, it would just mean shifting it from being declared by salt in the "infrastructure" folder to being written in python in the django folder.

I agree that you should keep the code itself in python, but that can be handled just by making it a management command that gets called by cron.

Sysadmins understand and love cron, too. I think celery reinventing the wheel might make some of them a bit mad.