Reminds me of this blogpost from a while back: http://www.hindsightlabs.com/blog/2010/03/15/jinja2-and-djan...
"In the beginning, there was Django, and it was good. But gradually we began to find its paradigms counterintuitive: we disliked the idea of apps and considered the built-in template language pretty crippled. More importantly, we prefer the epically powerful SQLAlchemy to Django’s ORM of Doom, so with the evidence before us, we switched to Pylons and the haven of SQLAlchemy/Jinja, only to discover we had switched from a shitty apartment in Brooklyn to a tent in the desert. No cockroaches, true, but no running water, either. Who really wants to write a thumbnail library? (Apologies to anyone who has actually written a thumbnail library)"
Pylons' past philosophy always seemed to be "we'll take the best-in-breed of python web software and put it together in an elegant way." Sadly, they seem to have abandoned that philosophy for the sake of protecting the precious nest eggs of massive full-stack framework developers.
While the new changes to Pylons certainly don't prevent you from using the aforementioned exceptional-quality components, the smushing-together of projects while trying to retain legacy compatibility seems to have created an enormous system where there isn't a cohesive or consistent way of doing things.
No thanks--I think I'll go for WebOb and its lightweight performance.