"I guess the hardest part to get over the hump with is understanding object orientation"
Why? Lots of people have experience with OO.
I just keep getting this feeling that you folks are making a mountain out of a molehill. ACS-backed websites are by no means "simple websites", the toolkit's relatively simple because the problem of creating complex websites is relatively simple. It's the pieces you glue together that are complex. The datamodel's the most complex piece of the ACS itself. That's the way it should be.
Why invent persistent store (ZODB) when there are proven database engines - object-oriented as well as relational - available? It's this "we need to build it all" mentality that I think leads to a lot of the complexity.
