We had to maintain a Pylons codebase that we never had the time to "port" to Pyramid (you know, rapidly growing startup, technical debt... then you get purchased by a big company and technical debt becomes a non-issue.) God, I hated a lot of that ecosystem. Lots of libraries that didn't work as promised (WebOb, WebTest, I'm looking at you) and upgrading them was impossible because newer versions broke Pylons.

All in all, I've always been a Django advocate. I know people hate the "batteries included" approach, but it guarantees that all parts work together well, and you'd be surprised how much of it is easily replaceable/removable. I've even used Django as a bare-bones router/request handler framework with great results.

I feel your pain. I used to work on a project started out with Pylons. But we got to give credit to Pylons & Pyramids folks. Despite being the least "famous" (well everyone has a different scale) these days, they still manage to pull in a lot of good code. Pyramid is my goto if I want to roll out everything on myself (once you know how to use things like tween it's really fantastic). I still can't get my mind around principal though. :{

I should go back to Django again, I started out with 0.90 when I first learned about MVC with Python.

> it guarantees that all parts work together well

Unless you need to extend or modify the behavior in an unsupported manner.

Django got much better since early 1.x versions, and gets better with every release, but I still find myself monkey-patching its internals (or copy-pasting classes with some minor changes) once in a few months.