That is really a personal preference on how you like to develop web apps, but from my observation, a lot of new projects that I have been exposed to are forgoin

That is really a personal preference on how you like to develop web apps, but from my observation, a lot of new projects that I have been exposed to are forgoing your traditional server side web layer (e.g Struts and Tile in the Java world) and using a CMS to do static templating (pushing static HMTL to a web server) and JavaScript widgets / JSON for the dynamic stuff that communicates to REST services on an application server. They are then using server side languages they are comfortable with (in your case Python), to implement JSON services. It is less "dumping" Python and more using Python to emit and consume JSON.