At one point my Atomgen script used Amara, because I liked the bindery interface. However, I was having problems with wide Unicode characters, so I've updated Atomgen to use more widely supported XML libraries (lxml's objectify API is similar to Amara's bindery). For future reference, I'll recount my history with Amara.

I started off using Sylvain Hellegouarch's Atomixlib, which is based on Amara2 or ElementTree. However, Sylvain seems to be falling behind as ElementTree and Amara continue to evolve, so I rewrote Atomgen to run off Amara2 directly, since Amara's bindery interface is wonderful. Things worked fine when I was installing Amara via easy_install:

sudo apt-get install python-setuptools
easy_install --prefix=~ amara

but I ran into the wide Unicode issues mentioned above when I tried to install Amara2 using Tiziano Müller's dev-zero overlay (Gentoo only packages Amara-1.2.0.2 by default).

The Amara + expat + wide Unicode is discussed in Gentoo bug 306655.