I did do some research on Maypole, actually. It seems ideal in every way except one: I can't see much proof that it is still under active development, or that it has a significant user/developer community to turn to for support. Am I wrong in those impressions? I would like to be, because it seems really desirable in all other regards--rather more so than Poe, which has active development and a significant community, but appears to be rather lower-level.

Maypole is very recent (April 2004) is a one-man work. If it works fine (and it seems it does), why bother? It's maintanable by one man (obviously), and it works right now.
BTW I'm pretty sure it's quite active, the latest update is from january 2005, not so long ago, and maypole has even given birth to a brand new nice framework :Catalyst, which may be interesting too.

Well, most of the Maypole folks already moved to Catalyst.

And it really seems Maypole is out of maintenance...(No life sign from the actual maintainer in a few months)

I cannot use Maypole in combination with our DB2 database, as the DB2 classloader is kind of broken. DB2 uses Schema names like Oracle. I tried one year ago and did a quick hack that time, but could not find the time to make it work properly and to contact the author.

And it came to pass that in time the Great God Om spake unto Brutha, the Chosen One: "Psst!"
(Terry Pratchett, Small Gods)