I have the same problem with UI. I am more of a technical person but would like to get better at design and layout. When I visit some of HN members' web sites I am always amazed at the way they look: clean and polished. I just wish I could do that kind of stuff! I will take the Udacity MOOC for a start. Thanks to other members for their suggestions on this thread.
I agree it's pointless to fight piracy. I have a friend who took the same approach that Maiden did: when his startup consisted of him and nobody else (he was essentially developing a software at night watching hockey games), his way to fight corruption was to upload his app to all the pirate sites he could find. That helped him get his software into the corporate world (word of mouth) and today he has almost 20 employees and his company recently bought an awesome property near Montréal that was transformed into new offices.
While of course not accounting for 100% of his success, I think his strategy was simply brilliant.
I guess I have to decide whether I am ready to pay a monthly fee on Heroku during bootstrap time as opposed to basically nothing on app engine. You said you were familiar with app engine, globally are you satisfied with the platform? I will use Python, whether on app engine or Heroku.
I know I would get to beta 1 or a prototype faster on app engine but I did not know the limitations you mention would cause such headaches. I thought we had more room.
What I like of app engine is the search service but I think it could become costly - there is no price right now but the api call limits seem rather low. And I see that you can do full text search in Postgres at no additional cost than the monthly database plan.