The regular proto-to-python feels fine to me. I quit Google a while ago and have still been using protobufs, and the main things that usually make teammates wary are: 1. No way to load .proto specs at runtime (there are GH issues about this) 2. No clear and easy way to use it with HTTP/1.1. Neither is specific to Python.

Both of these might sound silly if you're used to protobufs, cause you can build little helpers for both, but plenty of people have never used protos. They would shrug proto away if there weren't someone like me to attest that it won't get in the way. It seems like Google focused on gRPC, but the real prize for adoption would've been going after the simple HTTP+JSON use cases. Like an official protobuf Express middleware.