"That is precisely my point, a Python based organization may consist of personnel with expectations that their language can do more than what's possible."

But hold on! Various commentaries on the OSAF indicate that despite using Python extensively, most of the people involved were apparently Java programmers writing idiomatic Java-style code in Python. So, the OSAF's product may have been Python-based, but their organisation apparently wasn't. As you say in the main article:

"I'm curious as to how the decision was arrived at to not develop the server side code in Python."

I imagine that a bunch of people had their "suspicions confirmed" (recognise anything?) and stamped their feet about not using Java. Management presumably let them crank up Eclipse and start building the server components... for a project which was originally supposed to provide a peer-to-peer personal organiser.

"After all, Python has never been mainstream and possibly it's ardent supporters have developed unreasonable expectations as to what it's truly capable of."

http://www.python.org/about/quotes

Notice any big names there?

Really, the "dynamic languages encourage bad habits" attitude was already considered tired some time ago. If you want to look for causes of failure (or rather lack of existing success) then take a look at the organisation, the development practices, and the strategic decisions. There has been some good stuff done at OSAF - PyLucene springs to mind - but their apparent unawareness of the personal information management scene and the capabilities of existing technologies and applications quite probably led to way too much "not invented here" and the inevitably doomed monolithic, multi-year software project.

However, if you really want to point the finger at unproven technologies, you'd be better off waving it at wxWidgets, not Python. They didn't want to use Qt because they wanted full unfettered proprietary control over everything, and they brushed aside Gtk+ because it didn't have the Windows and Mac track-record (presumably to a chorus of "we use native widgets" by the wxWidgets people). Presumably, stuff like KDE and GNOME weren't on the radar of a bunch of the participants (probably being mainly Mac and Windows types), despite those projects having large software catalogues that show the readiness of the underlying GUI frameworks, and so they end up hiring someone to make wxWidgets bearable - yet another strategic diversion.

So, after a surprising amount of pontification, you managed to make the cheap shot with "suspicions confirmed" written all over it: it's the language! Converting the lengthy pontification into actual analysis might have given a deeper appreciation of what an oversimplification that particular conclusion is, however.