What happens when you do a django template "your way" 
    or "they way we can do it in 2 hours instead of 12"?

I've worked on a lot of projects and can't imagine the situation where you'd have this kind of a variation in time to create two remotely similar versions of a template. If you are talking about a fully designed template + CSS + JS, then you could possibly get up to 12 hours, but there would be no way to shorten that to 2 hours without doing something completely different.

    This is a comment about the non-web components of the 
    language.

And this entire discussion is about web development. The OP, who already knows multiple non-web-centric languages, asked specifically about web frameworks.

    The Django community is perhaps more opinionated. The 
    actual software isn't.

Depends on what you mean by the software. The framework overall is very opinionated, even if you can use parts of it in a modular way.

    The actual software has strong opinions (aka, 
    intentional inflexibility)

Let me take the opportunity to give you a heads up that Rails 3 has been out for months now and is widely used in production. One of the most significant design goals of Rails 3 was intentional flexibility.