Would you mind expanding on the issues you have with pipeline? I use pipeline at the moment and beyond a couple of small things (mainly working with vendor apps) I'm really happy with it, but I'm open to the idea that it's because of what I don't know than because it solves every problem.
Mostly with setup and configuration. Configuring it to work the way I expected required a lot of digging through documentation/code/blogs/fudging around. I don't like it when I have to do that, for a number of reasons -- a. I'm lazy and I don't like spending a lot of time doing upfront configuration, b. when something doesn't come with sensible defaults pre-configured, I assume I'll do something wrong and it'll have non-obvious but bad consequences.
I had this problem with django-compressor as well (but more with configuring 3rd party asset compilation). I usually recommend people use webassets via django-assets. It's easy to configure and very feature-ful.
