His personal preference is for Plone/Zope, which I find to be much more intimidating and confusing than lightweight enterprise Java.

I find Plone/Zope to be the single most intimidating code base in existence. I tried for years to scale the learning curve...and never got past the "hmm...I'm not sure why, but it's working now...I'm not going to touch it again" stage.

Plone/Zope are difficult, but the compactness of Python combined with the clarity of the design make digging in not terribly difficult. Understanding every aspect of the stack is difficult, Zope is everything from the HTTP server to the (object) Database, to the templating language (TAL). All those different pieces are difficult to keep in your head, but I'd still give it a hand up over most Java stacks: keeping pieces of the system in your head is easy.

I've seen this before. I really like the presentation style.

The conclusion is what you expect: building apps with Django, Ruby on Rails, TurboGears, and Plone is faster and less annoying than with J2EE.