Python & Zope

Clearly this is Python's killer app. The Zope development community and Digital Creations have been on a tear. Zope's content management looks like a complete set of tools as it organizes around folders, applications and users. Python itself has appeal in its object model, mature thread implementation and modest footprint. We rejected Zope for these reasons:

1. We don't know Python (we could learn if we had too, but do we have to?) and we don't know many people who are Python programmers. Hiring developers adept with more popular languages is hard enough, hiring for Python skills seems like an additional challenge
2. Extending and customizing Zope would require not just knowing Python but being highly skilled with it
3. Zope development doesn't seem to focus on best-of-breed integration but on internally developed tools. There are lots of HTTP engines and SQL databases, why has the Zope community expended their effort inventing their own?
4. Python has no CPAN

There may be good retorts to these issues but to us, they look like barriers we'd rather not contend with.