<p>Should I try to actually upgrade my existing app, or just rewrite it mostly from scratch, saving what pieces (templates, etc) I can?</p>

Upgrade. For me it was very simple: change
```
__str__()
```
to
```
__unicode__()
```
, write basic
```
admin.py
```
, and done. Just start running your app on 1.0, test it, and when you encounter an error use the documentation on
backwards-incompatible changes
to see how to fix the issue.