For days now I've been working in Twisted, building a severely trimmed-down version of Cinemon. Every so often little glimmers of greatness show up, but then I have to create yet another 2 functions to deal with success/failure cases, and the glimmer fades.

As I've mentioned time and again to anyone who will listen; the proper way to do networked communications is with micro-threading. It is by far the most elegant mechanism available (when it's available), as it allows you to (easily) create critical-code (i.e. can't be switched out) blocks, so avoids most of the cognitive overhead of normal threads, yet provides all the readability and straightforwardness that threads promise (even including natural exception handling, btw).