I recently contributed to Flask-Ask and have been developing apps for Alexa for a while now. The APIs/Boilerplate code for the `easier way` is definitely harder than Flask-Ask is right now.
Yes! I recently adapted a project of mine to be available as an Alexa skill, and it only took ~40 lines to get it working [0].
I agree, I've used this package since the beginning. Python is my favorite computer language so far. I started with Flash, then HTML & CSS, then jQuery, PHP, MySQL, etc.
Could not mention Python without Virtualenv, Django, and Flask. To me, these tools are like LEGO for programming.
I like JS too, who wouldn't? People literally live on the internet.
Played with this. It is stupid easy to make apps for Alexa with Flask-Ask.