Frankly, the discussion below turns quickly into bickering, but in response to your question, in my limited experience I think you've hit the nail on the head in terms of the size of the community, though I think that has more to do with the prominence of 37 signals etc and less to do with any technical superiority.
I personally prefer Django for a number of reasons though I've also been impressed by RoR in my dabbling. active record's migrations are nice, and the ease with which rails let's you write dynamically changing forms and various other niceness is really great.
Technical questions aside, I think RoR is the default web framework. At general hacker type meet-ups like Startup Weekend, Rails is pretty much the default framework to work in as more people are familiar with it.
Django is wonderfully well structured and literally just about anything can be accomplished elegantly by subclassing this or that. As you said, the difficulty comes in figuring out what and how to fill in those gaps, which more often than not includes heavy use of grep and browsing around the Django source.
I think you'll be fine with whichever you choose. Learning new languages and frameworks is enjoyable, so try some rails and see how you like it. Smart people and great projects have been done with both.
I personally prefer Django for a number of reasons though I've also been impressed by RoR in my dabbling. active record's migrations are nice, and the ease with which rails let's you write dynamically changing forms and various other niceness is really great.
Technical questions aside, I think RoR is the default web framework. At general hacker type meet-ups like Startup Weekend, Rails is pretty much the default framework to work in as more people are familiar with it.
Django is wonderfully well structured and literally just about anything can be accomplished elegantly by subclassing this or that. As you said, the difficulty comes in figuring out what and how to fill in those gaps, which more often than not includes heavy use of grep and browsing around the Django source.
I think you'll be fine with whichever you choose. Learning new languages and frameworks is enjoyable, so try some rails and see how you like it. Smart people and great projects have been done with both.