Great summary and a joy to read. Having moved from Django to Rails not so long ago, I do enjoy some things in Rails, but feel the heavy-weight aspects you touched on.
Dealing with some of the deployment and infrastructure aspects of our rails app, I also see how much more memory and resources are consumed. Anything from Unicorn processes through rake tasks, to the time it takes to launch the console or run tests seem an order of magnitude longer. It's like steering a 747 or a cruise-ship. Once it's running it's fast and quite stable, with nice and comfortable features and lots of elegance. But it doesn't feel anywhere near as nimble and responsive as python/django (and django is by no means a small framework).
actually just re-read my post. it makes me cringe a little. I was in a hurry and hit send a bit too fast.
The other choices:
I like node.
I've always liked the async/model on unix. Their community is healthy and a lot of the open source is clean. The npm system is a good system. Even if you aren't running node, people are using node as their toolchain for pure front end development (css transform,asset pipeline). If you are doing anything real-time with a browser, it is my first choice. (Erlang used to be my choice there)
Also, yes Javascript has its pros and cons, but at this point everyone must know it.
As another choice, I still like sinatra with rack middleware. Very light and it works well.
Beyond that, it depends on the application. I might use C,Scala,PHP or ?? who knows what.
Dealing with some of the deployment and infrastructure aspects of our rails app, I also see how much more memory and resources are consumed. Anything from Unicorn processes through rake tasks, to the time it takes to launch the console or run tests seem an order of magnitude longer. It's like steering a 747 or a cruise-ship. Once it's running it's fast and quite stable, with nice and comfortable features and lots of elegance. But it doesn't feel anywhere near as nimble and responsive as python/django (and django is by no means a small framework).
I'm wondering what's your top 3 choices today.