Great post. I've also had a love/hate relationship with Maypole. The installation was tricky, and its dependence on so many modules with version numbers close to 0.01 by various authors didn't inspire much confidence, but it worked. I also had to add warns all over the place to figure out where things were crashing.

The introductory documentation and articles are all good, but I found that when I started to try to actually adapt and extend Maypole for my needs, there were gaps that could only be filled by reading the code. And then when I tried to deviate a bit from the table/action/id model or add better support for many-to-many relationships things got ugly and I almost had to override entire classes (Class::DBI::AsForm was problematic). But it worked out in the end. My only concern is that it tends to be slow in my poor old hardware.

Using Maypole was definitely a great learning experience. I still use it for the application I developed at that time. When later I had to write a simpler application I found that it was much easier to write it from scratch thanks to the experience I gained. That doesn't mean that I won't use it again, it depends on what I want to do.