I know it's early yet, so take this with all appropriate grains of salt, but that is easily the most insightful comment I've read today, and really drives home a point I've been trying to make for awhile (and probably failed to).
I started out with Ruby, because of Rails, and just never seemed to quite make it jive with me mentally. When I found Python (because of Django), everything clicked more. I'm not even sure it was the language differences that clicked more for me, or whether it was the documentation, or the code samples, or some other intangible that made it all work.
Possibly, your greater experience was the difference. I don't know what experience you had before, but if you came to Ruby with no experience in a "dynamic" language, everything seemed new and hard-to-understand. Later, coming to Python, you probably understood everything better as you were learning it, having had experience with Ruby.
I'd had some experience with Perl and quite a bit of experience (had built a couple large-ish apps) in PHP.
The reason I referenced Rails and Django as motivators in finding those languages is because after having built and then forced to maintain an enterprise-class application in PHP, I REALLY liked the notion of an MVC framework, and things like Cake and Symfony weren't out (or at least I didn't know about them) yet.
So, yeah, I wasn't a programming newbie altogether, but I wasn't as comfortable in just picking up new languages either.
I started out with Ruby, because of Rails, and just never seemed to quite make it jive with me mentally. When I found Python (because of Django), everything clicked more. I'm not even sure it was the language differences that clicked more for me, or whether it was the documentation, or the code samples, or some other intangible that made it all work.