I would consider JavaScript my primary language, and you're right - Node is usually my go-to choice for a web backend. Express is pretty easy to grasp and be productive with.

But when I need more (auth, orm, logging, etc.), I feel like I'm spending more time searching for and curating packages and then trying to get them integrated than I am actually building an application.

Rails (especially its API flag) has caught my attention recently because this becomes a non-issue - you pretty much just use what Rails has included.