There seems to be a meme going around that things like Rails or Django need to somehow change and react to single page javascript web apps.
Maybe it's just me, but trying to modify your favorite web app framework to accommodate something they were never designed to do in the first place is foolish and will end up ruining what was originally great about tools like Django in the first place.
Just because a hammer is a popular tool that you really like doesn't mean it needs to change into ladder when you decide you need to climb onto a roof.
Rails/django are built to build websites. Websites are changing towards being JavaScript in the client single page apps. Thus either django/rails changes or gets removed.
I'm currently architecting a new app, and my django layer is still crucial for: API access to the data, Auth & Auth, background processing.
What we are trying to do as website builders has changed, and thus we are at a turning point. It isnt obvious yet what the go-to stack of the future is going to look like - is it django + tastypie + angular, or rails + ember, or meteor or something else?
Django was great for the old way of doing things (static or Ajax enhanced web). But it's not clear what it's role should be in the future.
To use your analogy: this is people trying to figure out if they still need hammers now that we're starting to use screws as fasteners.
Websites as a whole are not changing toward being single page apps. Some apps are being written as single page JS apps, but that's been the case for a while and we still aren't closer to the death of traditional websites than we were in 5 years ago.
Maybe it's just me, but trying to modify your favorite web app framework to accommodate something they were never designed to do in the first place is foolish and will end up ruining what was originally great about tools like Django in the first place.
Just because a hammer is a popular tool that you really like doesn't mean it needs to change into ladder when you decide you need to climb onto a roof.