to be honest, I think one of the key issues with "javascript" and "fast" in the same sentence. (yeah, this reply would be better beneath you, but HN says I can't reply to that guy.)
The reason why NoeJS is "fast" isn't JS. It's being event-driven.
I also believe JS isn't as easy to work with as python by design, even thus there are zillions of JS coders. Most of the people indeed follow the hype, more than "wait, is this actually something I should use" (you also did follow the hype and got bitten by it, in fact)
To be fair, V8 (the JavaScript engine under Node) is really, really fast. Even without introducing any event-driven code. Normal procedural code will (in general) be an order of magnitude faster than standard Python and Ruby runtimes.
"standard" run-times .. yeah, right. But try PyPy - same perf class as V8. And LuaJIT - probably faster than V8 - apart from GC. And for GC perf: Erlang does parallel (per "green thread") GCing ..
Javascript performance has come a long way since the days of IE6.
Saying that node.js is more difficult to work with than Python is just a matter of perspective isn't it?
Like any technology, in the hands of individuals that know what they are doing it is really not any more difficult than anything else.
For me personally, the fragmented Python community was what scared me to Node.Js in the first place. This was year's ago now, so perhaps Python has gotten better at that, but from a getting started point of view Node.js was and still is pretty easy, at the time the only thing that compared in Python in terms of ease of use was CherryPy, but It was not stable enough at the time for me to feel comfortable staying with Python for the one library that was not production ready.
The reason why NoeJS is "fast" isn't JS. It's being event-driven. I also believe JS isn't as easy to work with as python by design, even thus there are zillions of JS coders. Most of the people indeed follow the hype, more than "wait, is this actually something I should use" (you also did follow the hype and got bitten by it, in fact)