[Answer]-Talk me out of using sqlite and the django development server in a "production" environment?

DON’T use the built-in webserver in production. It’s just not designed to be a good webserver. It’s easy enough to have gunicorn run your django app just by passing commandline parameters.

DO use sqlite if the number of concurrent users at peak will be 3 or less. With much more than that, it’s likely to become a significant bottleneck.