I still think that the best resource available would be a basic "best
practice" project template for a simple pure-python package with a few
tests. I started putting one together myself
(https://github.com/pfmoore/sampleproject). It's basically done, but
I'm not sure how it (or something like it) could be incorporated into
the docs.

I like this idea.  how about move it to the "pypa" org to make it more official, and then it can be mentioned here:
https://python-packaging-user-guide.readthedocs.org/en/latest/packaging.html#getting-started-with-setuptools