weird wsgi/flask reload code thing

So here's an odd problem and an odd, probably bad, solution:
I'm experimenting with a Flask application set up like this:

   webapps/myapp
    | --apache2
    | --htdocs
        | --__init__.py
        | --index.py
        | --myapp.py
        | --templates
            | --testTemplate.html

per what I had read here, my index.py just said:

    from myapp import app as application

and myapp.py contained all the logic for dispatch etc.:

    import sys
    import sqlite3
    from flask import Flask, request, session, g, redirect, url_for, abort, \
         render_template, flash, _app_ctx_stack

    app = Flask(__name__)
    app.debug = True

    @app.route('/')
    def hello_world():
        return 'Hello World!'

etc.

Changes to templates were reflected immediately in responses. But if I changed code in myapp.py, I had to re-save, or touch index.py before responses would reflect the changes. Very inconvenient for development purposes.

I messed about quite a bit with httpd.conf, thinking it had something to do with WSGIDaemonProcess and suchlike, but to no avail.

What I finally wound up doing strikes me as faintly ridiculous, and possibly harmful, though it works and can be removed for production. I revised index.py as follows:

    import os    
    os.utime("/home/full/path/to/myapp/htdocs/index.py", None)    
    from myapp import app as application

There's a great deal I don't understand about how a wsgi app under flask works in the context of my webfaction environment. Can anyone tell me why I get this behavior; and, is there some more canonical way to fix it than calling an os process like this?