Scrapy is really awesome. It's a soup to nuts queuing, fetching and extraction workflow tool and if I had to start a larger than trivial project (like an rss reader or shopping aggregation site) I would base my spider toolchain on it.

Yea - I was definitely impressed by it and I just got started. It felt as if I was able to get rid of all the boilerplate and just focus on getting the next page that needed to be crawled and the information to extract.