I just want to do a basic site in Django and the flatpages app is super simple, but it doesn't support a couple of things that I need, namely custom fields and future-dating. That is setting a publish date to some point in the future rather than publishing immediately.
What's the best option for getting future-dated posts in Django?
The answer to this question is the same as your question "Is there anything better than Flatpages?"
django-cms allows you to arrange your flatpages in a hierarchical structure and lets you set a future publish date.
By custom fields I assume you mean fields defined by users? If so then you'll have to implement that yourself on top of django-cms.