Interesting read for sure. And certainly nice to see Go being subjected to some real-world use.
About the need to represent the CKAN ORM in Go, in order to get some useful JSON deserialization going; I have found this be to useful myself in a few cases. mainly when wrapping RESTful services exposed as JSON.
You mentioned it was 'unexpected', but would you also qualify it as a downside to the way python handled this?
With a large object model, I can see how maintenance becomes a little tricky. Specially since Go has no notion of object relations.