Django-Pinax : How do you use a pinax app apart from what you get with a pinax base project?
Pinax 0.7 was bundled with some apps and starter projects like social_projects which could be used for building a site more quickly, but I things changed in pinax 0.9. 
I think pinax has reinvented its structure for some reasons (eg,In pinax 0.7 some people were complaining that it was messy to customize starter projects or to use only subset of certain starter projects so could pinax 0.9 provides more flexibility).
Some of the apps included in a pinax website are somehow coupled with each other so that it is easier to deploy them together,sometimes all you have to do is just installing them and the apps will communicate with each other.
I am trying to understand Pinax and plan to use it in my next project.
I have started with a pinax basic project, and now I have something to go with runserver.
Now, I understand that I can customize the initial setup that I got from pinax and customize the profiles, themes, etc as per my requirements.
But is that all that pinax provides ?
I am very confused here, like I want to use the pinax phileo app in my project, so how does pinax helps me do that ?
My Effort :

I searched and found that I have to install it with pip install phileo
Then, add it to INSTALLED_APPS and use it as required.

But what did pinax do in this ?
Pinax has phileo featured on its website, but why ? Since I could have used it just like any other app on my non-pinax django project.
So, my question in a nutshell is :
What does pinax provide after a base project and default templates that come with pinax ?
Right, now it feels like pinax just provides a base project with some apps already working with some default templates. [ That's it ? ]
Then, what about other apps featured on pinax's website that do not come with base projects ?
Please, help clear up the confusion !
Update
My question is somewhat - What is the significance of pinax-ecosystem when we already have them listed somewhere like djangopackages.com ?