Also, I have to admit that I used to be wayyyy too stoked on scripting languages until I did a thought exercise realizing that the most interesting thing I could then ever do in the web-world is make an RPC to a far more interesting service.

Do you know about Facebook's architecture? I'll give you a hint which was brought to my attention a couple weeks. PHP is sitting on their front end, but trust me it is NOT doing any heavy lifting...

Lately I feel much more like "everything has its place" and I'm not so invested in hack hype. Java I'm seeing is a great language because it's kindof nestled between C++ and the web scripting/framework world. Lots of possibility for unique, almost C++ desktop-software-level but many strong frameworks and libraries for the web as well. And there are a lot of JVM languages that tie neatly together, so there is kindof a well-knit multi-lingual toolkit that is slightly less daunting than working with alien PHP-to-C++ RPCs (though this may be all psychological).