After spending most of the last night trying to model and fit a bunch of data with scipy, my main bottleneck was my understanding; working out what I needed to do. Once that was done, everything could be implemented in a single call. I don't think that's a particularly bad bottleneck at all.
There was some good discussion about this last time this was posted, and also current discussion over on reddit.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=182676 http://www.reddit.com/r/Python/comments/a2xzj/the_embarrassi...