Try boost-python, SWIG or cython instead. They give you a nicer c++ api and automatically handles ref-counting, exception handling and other things that are easy to forget.
Boost isn't being maintained? I did not know that. One of the project I use often - F/OSS but I'm a user, not core developer - uses Boost for C++/Python integration. They chose it many years ago. This topic has never come up on the mailing list or user group meetings. I suspect that since Boost "just works", no one has care to re-evaluate that decision.
Thanks for the pointers to what's going on in the C++/python integration layer. I'll experiment with it.
https://www.boost.org/doc/libs/1_61_0/libs/python/doc/html/t...