Thanks for the brilliant answer. I am now able to display a rudimentary zope.container view.
Maybe you're getting the adaptation error because you don't have an `IPrincipalAnnotationUtilty` utility?
That was indeed the problem. I was looking in the wrong place. Of course it still needed the Grok infrastructure to register the utility. And then to do the following adaptation. return IPrincipalClipboard(principalAnnotations) But altogether not that difficult. What is interesting is how much easier Grok makes ZTK development. I highly recommend Grok to all concerned.
For the more generic problem of a Zope2 like management interface on top of ZODB storage containing a copy+paste implementation, done on modern libraries (including a zca registry), you could try SubstanceD:
Thank you for the pointer. Lots of great stuff over there. I will take a much closer look. Although it is not targeted at TTW development, it is more for administrative use. So again thank you for the help. I was quite stuck, and am now back to making progress.