If you don't want to do Java projects in the future, I suggest getting comfortable enough with other languages and frameworks on your own time.
For now: what's wrong with "RESTful" URLs? And you do understand you're not required to use 4 different layers in Java either, right?
I like RESTful URLs, the problem with Django seems to be that it doesn't really cater for them (or at least the routing system does not know about GET, POST, PUT and DELETE, as far as I could see).
Java layers: I know, but using Java usually also entails using Spring and Hibernate and "doing things the proper way" :-/
I know I should get comfortable with other frameworks, I just haven't found one I was happy with (tried Rails, and atm doing a small Python project - where I settled for bottle.py, which is great fun, but probably too plain atm.).
I highly suggest looking into Guice (why defeat the advantage of Java's static typing by passing strings around through XML documents?) and jDBI (ORMs are evil, jDBI takes a lot of the boiler plate out of writing JDBC calls: http://jdbi.org/).
If you absolutely must use Spring, at least use Spring's JavaConfig (as opposed to XML based configuration) and SimpleJdbcTemplate (another way to avoid the boiler plate of JDBC without going to an ORM).
JVM doesn't mean having to use Java (but your partner seems to be dead against Scala, which is his loss). Java, however, doesn't mean having to use Spring and JEE.