They're probably hung up because it's making them look small-time. What do 37Signals actually do, other than generate a steady stream of blog posts for HN? They make some sort of dropbox knockoff, right?
Rails was groundbreaking. Yes. DHH did something great but that's now 7 or 8 (!) years ago. Rails has aged, DHH showed often how opinionated he can be and that he just isn't perfect. And the 37signals products live primarily because of DHH's and Rails' reputation and not because there are outstanding (there tons of better Basecamps out there).
Still DHH is a smart guy but a Kevin Systrom who built a company, who learned how to build a scalable backend while starting this company and then sold this company after just 2 years for 1 billion achieved something special as well and this should be appreciated instead of ranting. This is just infantile and shows once again DHH's temper and lack of self-control.
But what has he done for us haters lately? I say we hang him. Maybe we should pluck his fingernails out first for making HN members up-vote his blog post.
About the Django part... yeah, I've heard that said, but the fact is that Rails was first and most of the cool parts of Django are things that they ended up doing like Rails.
Having used both, my opinion is that even today Django didn't understand some of the core ways that Rails was superior so didn't copy the right things. So yeah, Django was around and can sort of claim some concurrency with Rails development and I'm sure it even influenced Rails in small ways.
In terms of leading in a new paradigm, though, Rails did it. Django didn't.
Django is the Ringo of the greatness of the Beatles. Sure, Ringo was there swinging his sticks and even wrote a couple of catchy tunes. Sure, he contributed in his own small ways... but seriously he wasn't the leader and he wasn't the secret ingredient to the band's phenomenal success.