I'm a web developer for a living and I'm going to be stoned, tarred, and feathered for this, but I prefer Coldfusion.
I've heard good things about Coldfusion. I would have considered it for some projects, but the barrier to entry for me was the cost. A similar free product is Zope which is written in Python. It has a template based language that superficially resembles Coldfusion. I haven't used either, only read about them, so I can't say how deep the similarities go.
For me these days, the IDE is just as important as the language. A good IDE can make a crappy language pretty productive. Does CF have its own IDE?
I just use dreamweaver. It has anything you can imagine for coldfusion (function tool tips, proper color coding and all that). I've never been much of an "object dropper" style coder, but then again, nearly everything I write is fully custom to real specific stuff, so it ends up being kind of hard to reuse objects, etc.
Yeah, the beauty of Coldfusion is that it does start out really easy to use, template based as you mentioned, but can go extremely far. Anyone could whip together a site with hardly any prior knowledge. Yet at the same time, people like me who've used it since nearly its inception can whip out entire rich web app frameworks with. I see Coldfusion a bit like libertarianism. The right choice, but most people have horrible misconceptions!