[mgkimsal]

is this terribly different from many other choices made by other companies?

"Whew... we're all totally psyched with node, and all have experience with it, know how to solve problems with it... but we're going to commit to Django. We don't want to, but we're going to."

Does that exchange ever happen? I've seen the opposite - almost every tech stack I've seen at small and medium sized companies was primarily the result of the few decision makers who had experiences (good or bad) with specific tech which influenced their decision to use X.