Django - use generic views or not?
Whether to use generic views or not is your prerogative. It won't cause you any trouble, although you might find yourself coding repetitious view logic. You might consider using wrapped/subclassed generic views in your views.py (frequently you'll want to customize them anyways), which would keep the boilerplate out of your urls.py and all the views in the same place.
I was going through quick poll tutorial on the Django site, and the last topic is introduction of generic views. A convenient way to bypass the need of creation of custom views for every URL pattern.
This is the main idea as far as I understand:
1) Request -> URL patterns -> View -> Template
or
2) Request -> URL patterns (Generic View) [-> optional Template]
2 seems to require less code, it's only two steps as opposed to four, but on the downside you're sticking more stuff into URL patterns, there's more automagic going on, and your views are now defined in two places.
I really like the idea of having URL Patterns just that - patterns, and not adding in additional boilerplate. I also like the idea of having all Views explicitly defined, even the simple ones, so that later I know where to find them all without going back and forth through files. Plus we all know that any automagic is harder to customise than something you build from scratch (at least from Django scratch).
Am I missing something? Am I doing a big mistake that will haunt me later of I don't use generic views at all?