Personally, I stopped using Twisted as soon as I realized that I had just written a factory factory. Your mileage may vary.
Have you looked at eventlet or gevent? They're libraries in Python for doing single-threaded networking (like Twisted) but in a very lightweight and pleasant way. They use coroutines, so you can usually write code as if it were blocking, and you can use the standard library networking functions with non-blocking magic sprinkled on top. I've found it to be remarkably straightforward.
Have you looked at eventlet or gevent? They're libraries in Python for doing single-threaded networking (like Twisted) but in a very lightweight and pleasant way. They use coroutines, so you can usually write code as if it were blocking, and you can use the standard library networking functions with non-blocking magic sprinkled on top. I've found it to be remarkably straightforward.