Same thing happened to me: I wrote the module that does Microsoft Office files in Python. At the time, the solutions for doing it in Python were 'talk to some Java library' or 'talk to some .net library'. I read the openxml spec and made something which did basic creation, extracting text, modifying docs.
I totally didn't have time to maintain it, then Scanny took over. It's now hugely popular, the code handles non-Word OpenXML docs, and most of the code has been added or refactored under Scanny.