> But it completely got in my way so many times that I actually thought about writing my own Python web framework; which I shouldn't because people have been working on web-related stuff for the past 20 years.
Pylons is dead. The authors moved on to Pyramid after declaring Pylons core too difficult to maintain. The upgrade path to Pyramid is "Run your pylons app inside pyramid as you rewrite it from scratch [into our new shiny framework we promise not to abandon]!"
You could always try Flask or Pylons.