SimpleTAL is a painful dependency, because it has no download files on PyPI: the only way to depend on it properly is therefore using a direct URL reference, and as I understand it packages with such references those can't be uploaded to PyPI.
Porting to Chameleon (Zope's default TAL implementation nowadays) turns out not to be too difficult. The main work involved is because it doesn't support path expressions. It would be possible to add those using `z3c.pt`, and I considered that, but that has a significant dependency tree for packages that don't already use the Zope Toolkit, and it would have also required extra startup complexity to register `ITraversable` adapters. It's easier to convert path expressions to the equivalent Python expressions, although the process of doing so was unfortunately quite error-prone.