You're right, I can be out of date, I didn't code in Django in the past year, only in Ruby on Rails, but still I have the impression that things go much slower on Django release circle compared to Rails

I'm glad to hear they are fixing the annoying bug in 1.5.

About libraries, Python follows the idea that there should be only one way to do something, ruby follows the idea that there should be more ways to do something, this is why there are a lot of alternatives, for example:

Testing: rails built in, rspec, minitest, test-unit, bacon, etc JSON Generation for views: jbuilder, rabl Memcache: memcached, dalli

And many other gems have more than one alternative, which I think it's nice.