To me pasting few lines in INSTALL_APP, running pip install few times to start a project is not a big deal. It's writing code to wire up user login, user profile, change password, verify email that wasting the time. I said 'wire up' because most of the functionalities already exists either in django itself or some 3rd party app but still you need to write some code to glue all that together.

That's why I'm more keen on app that I can add to INSTALLED_APP, add one line to TEMPLATE_CONTEXT_PROCESSORS (because it provide few useful template context and I have a complete environment to start development. It already provide login and nice base template that I can extend. In short, an admin like app but not for admin.