I played with the foundation in my django project using the django development server. All I did was load the Foundation 5 static files (JS, CSS) and add them to the django static files. Then I added the necessary scripts to the base template, as shown below: http://foundation.zurb.com/docs/css.html . I have not put it into production yet, but I see no reason why this will not work or why using static files is wrong (as you thought in your question).
There are advantages to compiling CSS yourself using SASS if you are really hardcore, and I suggest that using template tags with django-zurb-foundation is a little cleaner or maybe easier to implement if you have a lot of templates that you would need change, but if you are like me and you just want to try Foundation in a small project, then downloading additional applications (django-bower, django-zurb-foundation) is not required.
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