AnthonyB3
People like you who have never actually used web2py routinely express concern that this will somehow set up false expectations and confuse people about how Python modules and imports work, but in practice this is simply not the case. Note, web2py also includes a number of modules that require explicit importing, and applications can include their own modules as well as import standard library and third-party modules. As a result, web2py developers are perfectly comfortable with normal Python imports and do not have any false expectations.
Web2py is indeed using its "great power" responsibly.
Regarding popularity, for some time now the web2py Google Group has had more postings than the Django group, and the web2py group membership has been growing at a much faster rate than Django. Overall, Django is still more widely used, but web2py is certainly popular and growing rapidly.
Regarding whether web2py is "bad", that's obviously your opinion, but it is notable that you did not provide any argument or evidence whatsoever to support it.
In two years of active mailing list participation, I've never seen any actual users complain about these problems. They are hypothetical concerns that simply do not arise in real world usage.
Would you care to elaborate on that? Have any of these smart web hackers used web2py for real web development? I ask because web2py has had thousands of happy users building and maintaining web applications for several years now, and in practice, no one seems to be having the kinds of problems one might expect from a "fundamentally incorrect" approach. What exactly is fundamentally incorrect?
Don't listen to the naysayers about web2py -- it is rare to find one who has actually ever used it. Meanwhile, web2py has a large, active, and steadily growing base of real users who are very happy and doing just fine producing and maintaining web applications with it. In fact, many web2py users are former Django users who simply find web2py more productive (see http://www.quora.com/What-are-the-advantages-of-web2py-over-...).
Note, most of the criticisms of web2py have all the earmarks of FUD (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fear,_uncertainty_and_doubt) -- lots of references to authority and calls to stick with a perceived standard way of doing things, but not much discussion of actual technical merits nor presentation of any empirical evidence to back up the strong claims being made (see http://www.quora.com/Is-web2py-a-good-Python-web-framework/a...). Some of the critics seem overly concerned with the notions of "explicitness" and "magic", but not everyone shares their concerns: https://twitter.com/#!/zedshaw/status/80418794526351360.
The DAL can be used to model any set of tables and relationships that can be created in an RDBMS, so it's not clear what the problem would be modeling the relationships among these entities. Should be fairly straightforward.