I think the vision behind ColdFusion is/was (it is still being sold) solid, I think the implementation is however flawed.
I am the developer of HiveMind (crudzilla.com), it shares the ColdFusion vision (ie simpler business application development), but the approach is quite different.
Over the years developers were building more advanced applications, and that vision has changed, as more "traditional" features have made it into the language (Hibernate, closures, etc) and once lauded features have more or less fallen to the way-side (for instance form and database tag abstractions like cfform and cfupdate, custom tags, etc)
I think the vision is not really about a specific technical approach or language or framework. It is about building or inventing new ways of delivering business applications that is business focused.
Traditional approaches (IDEs and Frameworks) cater to developer desires, which is often not aligned with business needs....this is a very big debate that I'd rather not start in an HN forum :)
