most of the reporting emails automatically generated by crontab due to the utilization of django-periodically, can be suppressed by redirecting the output of the crontab task to /dev/null,
the adminsitrator of the network at CalPoly is ok with this option.
Therefore, due to 1, 2 and 3; django-periodically will kept being used as the main task scheduler.
django-periodically has the following issues:
Celery is an equivalent application that does not depend on crontab and provides support for Python 3.3.