Any pointers on using Ropevim? Is it a usable library?

Rope is a refactoring library for Python and RopeVim is a Vim plugin which calls into Rope.

The idea of using RopeVim seems great to me, is there any documentation on "getting started" with RopeVim?

I've followed what documentation there is: https://bitbucket.org/agr/ropevim/src/tip/README.txt

I suppose I'm looking for:

• look at this blog post / article / link it makes it all make sense.
• alternate recommendations like "forget about RopeVim", it doesn't work very well or say "use this instead of ropevim".

The documentation you found only shows the Vim particulars. If you want to see what those rope functions can do, see the rope documentation. Note, it's incomplete and points to the unittests for a full overview of what it can do.