Django 1.8: Create initial migrations for existing schema

Question

I started a django 1.8 project, which uses the migrations system.
Somehow along the way things got messy, so I erased the migrations folders and table from the DB, and now I'm trying to reconstruct them, with no success.

I have three apps (3 models.py files), and the models reflect the tables EXACTLY!

The best approach that I've found so far was:

1. Erase all migrations folders. Done!
2. Delete everything from the django_migrations table. Done!
3. Run python manage.py makemigrations --empty <app> for every app. Done!
4. Run python manage.py migrate --fake. Done! (although it works only if I run it after every makemigrations command.

Now I add a new field, run the makemigrations command, and I receive the following error:
django.db.utils.OperationalError: (1054, "Unknown column 'accounts_plan.max_item_size' in 'field list'")

I've been burning HOURS on this thing. How the h**l can I initialize the migrations so I can continue working without migration interruptions every time?

Why is it so complicated? Why isn't there a simple one-liner: initiate_migrations_from_schema?

EDIT:
Now things get even nastier. I truncated the django_migrations table and deleted all the migrations folder.
Now I try to run python manage.py migrate --fake-initial (something I found in the DEV docs), just so it sets up all of Django's 'internal' apps (auth, session, etc) and I'm getting:
(1054, "Unknown column 'name' in 'django_content_type'").
Now, this "column" is not a real column. It's a @property defined in Django's contenttypes app. WHAT IS GOING ON HERE? Why is it identifying the name property as a real column?

Answer 1

Finally got it to work, although I don't know why and I hope it will work in the future.
After doing numerous trials and going through Django's dev site (link).
Here are the steps (for whoever runs into this problem):

1. Empty the django_migrations table: delete from django_migrations;
2. For every app, delete its migrations folder: rm -rf <app>/migrations/
3. Reset the migrations for the "built-in" apps: python manage.py migrate --fake
4. For each app run: python manage.py makemigrations <app>. Take care of dependencies (models with ForeignKey's should run after their parent model).
5. Finally: python manage.py migrate --fake-initial

After that I ran the last command without the --fake-initial flag, just to make sure.

Now everything works and I can use the migrations system normally.

I'm sure I'm not the only one who encounters this issue. It must be documented better and even simplified.

Update for Django 1.9 users:
I had this scenario again with a Django 1.9.4, and step 5 failed.
All I had to do is replace --fake-initial with --fake to make it work.