I've started learning Rails, Django, and Node.js. and I've found that learning to use these frameworks takes an enormous amount of time.
Because Rails and Django have so many parts the complexity makes it hard to remember how to do everything. Node.js is simpler, but I have found that you have to spend a lot of time making things that are already available configured in rails and django.
In terms of time effectiveness how do these three options size up? I've spent enough time on each to get a basic understanding, but would like to know which option (or an alternative) makes the most sense to purse investing a lot of time learning. And in terms of payoff, which will enable me to accomplish the most?
It's completely depend on you, But in my opinion, You should not compare Rails and Django with Node.js. It's better to compare Node.js with Ruby or Python and compare Rails and Django with Node.js based full stack frameworks like Geddy, Sails.js or Total.js.
I have about 3-4 years experience of working with these frameworks and I can simply say that while Django and Rails speed up your development process, Node.js based frameworks are more flexible and most of the time give you better performance, But I It's better for you to learn the real procedure of web development instead of sticking to an specific framework. When you learn how to develop the web, You can easily switch between frameworks and In real world you can't say that one framework is better than another one, You should choose your framework based on the project needs.
The bottom line: You can read these nice articles and comparisons: