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.
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.