Looking for a language/framework

[walterbyrd]

Way back when, I got a lot of training and experience in highly
structued software development.  These days, I dabble with
web-development, but I may become more serious.

I consider php to be an abombination, the backward compatibility issues
alone are reason enough to make me hate it. Rail looks promising, but
it's difficult to find inexpensive hosting that supports rails.

I like python much better, but I'm not certain it's as well suited for
web developement. I'm not sure how th e apache module thing works. I am
using shared hosting, they provide python, but I'm not sure how limited
I'll be.

Ideally, I would like to be able to develop a database driven web-app,
in much the same manner as I could develop an ms-access app. As much as
I dislike msft, I have to admit, an ms-access app can be put together
quickly, without any steep learning curve.

I've been looking at python web frameworks, and I'm not sure what to
think. It seems like these frameworks would allow me to do a lot of
work, with a small amount of code, but the learning curve seems very
steep.

I wouldn't even mind the steep learning curves, so much, except, it
seems to me that anything developed with one framework, would not work
with another. So if I changed my mind about which framework, I'd have
to start all over again - re-learning everything, re-writing
everything. Of course, everybody says their framework is the best. But
how can I know for sure? I don't have time to try them all.