Nobody will shout you down for iterating SHA1 or for using one of the bcrypt/scrypt/PBKDF.

In actual fact, I won't even shout at you for using salted single-pass SHA1, as long as you don't brag about it, or talk about how your "salt" construction improves security.

Well, in an ideal world I'd be in favor of using something better than what we currently have as the default, but for now we have to strike a compromise -- SHA1 is about the "best" hash that's ubiquitously available on the platforms and Python versions we support. Down the road when we've deprecated a couple older Python releases and can rely on things like hashlib being available, it'll be time to talk about improving the default setup.

And, in the context of common use cases, I think it's probably an OK compromise -- I doubt somebody's going to devote the resources to plucking the password for a random blog, for example. Once you need tougher security, you can plug in whatever scheme you like for storing credentials and authenticating users which, anecdotally, most people seem to be doing when warranted (there are quite a few third-party auth backends floating around). And, really, if I were going to brag about anything, it'd probably be the ease with which you can do that -- one class with two methods, a settings tweak and (depending on your credential scheme) possibly a short form class that knows what the incoming data will look like, and you're done. Of course, I think we could make it even easier, so I won't be bragging about it just yet :)