[Swizec]

I've been using Django on GAE for a while now and it's working pretty well.

There's a port called django-nonrel, which is specifically designed to work on nonrelational databases. So yes, you can't do fancy joins and stuff, but hey, most of the time you can work around that; but it's still great to be using the ORM just as you are used to it in 90% of the cases.

Although I do agree with the OP that all the rules GAE imposes can be a pain in the arse a lot of the time I really really love them. It pushes me to design my application well and to make it able to handle the load I'm expecting to be handling in a foreseeable future. If I didn't scaling even up to a few thousand users could get dicey.