You're missing that Zope application-development-through-the-browser could (and did) allow you to do just about anything with a Turing-complete template languag

You're missing that Zope application-development-through-the-browser could (and did) allow you to do just about anything with a Turing-complete template language, and if that was too unwieldy, Python script objects (which executed in a sandbox to prevent direct access to the filesystem, etc.). Nothing forced you to a saner development model except for wanting to include 3rd-party libraries and being able to distribute and version your code. Remember, this was when servers were definitely pets and scaling a web app meant scaling up to a bigger server, not scaling out to more servers. It wasn't immediately obvious (especially to brand new developers) that having all the code for even a simple CRUD web app, which you only ever expected to have a single deployment to a single server, live as pickles inside an object database that had a transactional history of edits, was inherently a bad idea. A lot of interesting stuff was created that way, and integration with the facilities that were missing such as version control led directly to capabilities like versioning content in cvs and svn (since code was just another kind of content). Eventually, Zope's so-called "Z-shaped learning curve" hindered adoption and other Python-based web-app platforms surpassed it in popularity.