YMMV but for me this is what makes it easy to maintain: you just need to learn Python not the personal programming style of the previous developer.
10 years ago RIA platforms were the rage (Silverlight, Flex). By this time I was working in operations but willing to switch career to software development. Finally the opportunity presented and I picked OpenLazlo and PHP/MySQL. Two weeks later it was clear that I would not be able to meet the deadline using this platform. I googled for something like "productive web frameworks" and the top entries were about Rails, followed by Django. I could not make Rails work on my local development environment but the the Django tutorial worked like a charm.
So the truth is that I started using Python more seriously because I was not smart enough to make through the Rails tutorial. But no complaints - Python/Django is paying my rent since then!
Being "forced to use Python" sucks as a Perl developer.
sigh
(And for the record, I’ve dealt with 100K+ sloc perl and python projects, and the perl one was more maintainable than the python projects, even after multiple python rewrites. It doesn’t have to go that way, but it certainly can!)
I mean it only as a half joke, unfortunately.
As a side note, "forced" often means "we have a lot of beginners here and they want to do Python".
Better than rewriting failing Python or Node projects once a year.