I agree. Try pyenv. It lets you install a particular version for use in a shell account, then `python -m venv venv`. I like pip-tools for requirements management, but some reasonable people disagree.
DAL was the first Python db abstraction I used, and I liked it well enough, but I've since used both Django and SQLAlchemy, and they both seem less opaque to me, maybe because not obscured by some of the weird things about web2py itself.
I love the auto-generated backwards references you get in Django and SA when you use foreign key and many to many fields. They make life so much easier. I don't recall how that was achieved in DAL, I just remember it being... complicated.
I misspoke then. I would call you an engineer without your being a member of a professional association. I guess in my mind the degree is enough. I'll never have PEng on my business card, but you at least have the potential.
Actually it's just being respectful. I'm not an engineer, but I work with a lot of engineers who actually have the qualifications to call themselves engineers, so if I call myself one, I'm essentially lying.
I was going to comment, Take a look at the Dao De Jing, so I like that the top comment is a quote from it. The book is full of such pithy saying, and I often think that its advice to be like water isn't so much to go with the flow as it is that water takes in whatever people pollute it with and objects to nothing.
Or in a non-medieval context, an engineer is member of a professional association of engineers whose rights and responsibilities are legislated. And imo, anyone who calls themselves an engineer but isn't a member of a professional association of engineers is misrepresenting themselves.