Sorry, but choice of language means more than nothing. ColdFusion is pretty dead-end and not a particularly good choice these days for a variety of reasons.
Let me break it for you, nobody except you and some opinionated programmers on the web, cares what language you wrote website X or web app Y in. If it works, and you are able to maintain it - you won't hear a single word of praise from the 'users' congratulating you on your stellar choice of language. They'll rip you to shreds when it stops working but even then they'll never tell you off for choosing the wrong language.
If it works, and you can maintain it - its all good. Even Cold Fusion, even PHP, even Perl, even Brainf#@k
I understand your point of view, and in specific cases, the choice has little practical impact. However, when a business is dependent on an aging technology (language/framework/etc), the choice can have real consequences. As one example, when that very competent programmer who has expert level knowledge in this aging technology decides to move on, if the technology isn't well supported by a vendor, user community, and/or local talent pool, the business can be in a real bind.
As we (I work for Adobe!) have talked publicly about the next rev of ColdFusion, and have shown features, talked about focus areas, etc, it is certainly not dead-end in terms of active product development.
I agree that Adobe's ColdFusion is deadend but not Open Source Railo which is more of a Java Framework. At the end of the day there's no logical reason against CFML any more than there is against PHP, Rails, etc.
>ColdFusion is... not a particularly good choice these days for a variety of reasons.
Not that I disagree with you, but I wonder if the reasons you have in mind are valid. A lot of the reasons one might assume CF sucks aren't really applicable (i.e. speed, security) any more than most other languages.
I assume all major-ish choices have decent speed, security, etc. The main things are activity, books, resources, people to hire, libraries, support, etc.