It was a compliment. Pylons in 2007 was Ben Bangert and other Python devs who had been working the area since the late 90s with Zope and other projects sitting down and more or less porting the good parts of Rails to Python.

You had the same routing, you had very very fast templating in Mako, the best ORM in the business in SQLAlchemy, all of the tooling around Rails (scaffolding, testing, etc) and the best part of it was it was all designed to be easily swappable. Didn't like the files that were getting generated with your project? Tweak Paste. Different templating system? Few lines of code to be swapped out.

It was a very forward-thinking and well-designed framework at a time when the Python VM was much better than Ruby. Feature for feature it was better than Rails, it just wasn't as popular.