I made tornado work on top of twisted by removing 1,389 lines of code and adding 92 (and I believe most of that was adding compatibility wrappers to keep the API mostly sane).

My effort is not done -- I do have a lot more code to remove. Where it is now, with having mostly just removed code, I can do far more than tornado can do out of the box, and I can do it starting with the same API. I did not modify twisted.

And seriously, these are all insanely smart guys. If they have to "ramp people up", they have to do that with their new framework anyway, but I can't believe that if I can understand twisted, they can't.