I understand your pain. In 4.x, we had a flat API structure but it provide completely unusable for large configurations - modifying 100's of objects, required 100's of calls. In v9.x, we opted to make the syntax more expandable by enabling bulk objects for all our methods. This dramatically improved performance for multi-step operations with the consolation that it made the API a bit more complex for those that just want to do a single task.
As for Jython, I have no experience with it so I wouldn't even no where to start with regards to array declarations. The code I gave you works with Java and Apache Axis 1.0. Anyone out there know how to create 2-d arrays in Jython?
-Joe
Nimbostratus