This actually seems like a reasonable approach to me. WSGI isn't really friendly to application developers (because it's not the API they expect when they naive

This actually seems like a reasonable approach to me. WSGI isn't really friendly to application developers (because it's not the API they expect when they naively approach the problem) so mostly it's been wrapped by the various frameworks. Armin's article seemed to be saying "Stop bitching that you can't use WSGI because it's more complex than you think. Here's why. Just pick a framework." This approach seems to take care of the 90% problem while leaving the full power of WSGI exposed if you want/need it. It's like a minimalist web framework to do just the smoothing over of the WSGI API and nothing else. The backwards compatability is key: It can be adopted by application developers, and doesn't depend on server developers. It may not have sprung into existence in a perfect form but I think it is definitely worth exploring this approach.