I would like to create a tool with Python and the Twitter API to be able to create lists of tweets that match certain criteria like "contains the word Python" or "has at least 2 likes". Or simple stats like top posters, most liked, etc.
All of my search pointed me to the Tweepy project. But for that I need 0Auth tokens. So I applied for a developer account and was denied with the comment "we are unable to serve your use case".
Do I have any alternatives?
Well, as a general answer for these situations, you can always use a web-based automation tool, which is basically a library that interacts with the remote feature of the browsers and replicates what would be you "opening the website, logging in, etc" and can subsequently parse all data from the rendered elements.
Try looking at selenium, i've used that library in the past to raw scrap facebook and it worked flawless.
Edit: Note that this isn't a twitter specific library, you will have to find the html tags in the login website and use them to log in, same for parsing data, etc.
using Python and the Twitter API without authentication tokens