...as the payoff for learning to hack will be a few months.

It doesn't have to be that long. Do you have any programming experience? Do you have any friends that do? With a smart friend guiding you through, you can skip a lot of annoyances when you learn to program.

This is also a prudent point - what have you been doing the last 12 months? That would have been more than enough to get the hang of Django...