There are definitely limitations of the implementation of CPython itself, which do not need to be there if the language were willing to ratchet down the dynamism in certain cases. (Even without that, there are potentially implementation avenues that would have permitted better concurrency than the current codebase.)
However, implementation aside, I think it's invalid to assert that the existence of a cottage industry is inherently a sign of weakness; it's also a sign of just how pervasively Python is used. Find me another language that's used as widely, as popularly (i.e. not just two random guys using it that way), and in as many different kind of settings as Python. (Java might be a contender, except that it's not really used for the really high-performance scientific workloads like Python.)
However, implementation aside, I think it's invalid to assert that the existence of a cottage industry is inherently a sign of weakness; it's also a sign of just how pervasively Python is used. Find me another language that's used as widely, as popularly (i.e. not just two random guys using it that way), and in as many different kind of settings as Python. (Java might be a contender, except that it's not really used for the really high-performance scientific workloads like Python.)