Leaving aside your sarcasm, Django was more a matter of convergent evolution—it was developed concurrently with Rails and just released slightly later—and both frameworks have copied a lot of awesome innovations from each other.
I don't think that's fair. I really worked hard on the sarcasm part.
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.
Many of the cool parts of Rails are things they ended up doing like Django, too. ActiveAdmin, say. You might not remember how limited Rails was when it first came out, even though it was still obviously The Right Thing.
