I believe that both the Django Core team and Tom Christie (DRF author) have stated that they have no desire to see DRF brought into Django, as that would tie DRF updates to Django updates, which would potentially slow down DRF releases.

makes sense.

The new Django Migrations from 1.7 are heavily influenced by the south project, but are slightly different.

was south integrated? the docs say it hasn't http://south.readthedocs.io/en/latest/about.html#a-brief-his... but maybe it's outdated?

The main developer of south was responsible for bringing schema migrations to Django's core... don't know how similar it was to south's codebase, though: https://www.djangoproject.com/weblog/2013/mar/22/kickstartin...

Its pretty similar from developer perspective.

That doc is dated 2010. Further proof docs lie ;)

But as other people said, no idea if it was copied and pasted into the django codebase or rewritten from scratch.. but everything South did, I believe Django now does.

Rewritten by the author of South. Basically, all the good ideas of South with some of the problems fixed.