Doesn't this miss the forest for the trees? The entire point is to drive with epoll.

Well, yes. But it means you can do sync non-blocking IO by hand.

> I bring this up because a main reason for my distaste is Async's incompatibility with non-Async. I also bring this up because lack of a Django or SQLAlchemy-style ORM is one reason I continue to write web applications in Python.

So you use gevent/greenlet?