• The data access layer is separated out completely.
• Security built-in.  Easy to prevent csrf and xss without having to think much about it.
• Packages css/js for you.  Would be awesome if it worked with Sass/Coffeescript (or had something similar).
• Easy to write acceptance / unit tests.
• The language the framework is in has a good DSL for constructing SQL queries (like korma, sequel, etc).  I don’t really need a full-fledged ORM — I like using postgresql features like views and triggers — but I’m not hand-writing SQL all the time.
• The compiler can catch typing or missing method errors.  Computers should do my work for me, damn it.  I should know on compilation that a route/url was generated somewhere in my application without the correct parameters.
• Views probably will get complex.  There should be a good solution for complicated views.  HTML generation code often shares lots of things with tiny variations.
• Comes with a project skeleton.
• Deploys on heroku.
• Live code-reloading in development mode.
• Compiling / packaging is easy.
• Installing the app to a server doesn’t require installing a butt-load of dependencies managed separately from the application (I’m looking at you Ruby).
• Has some sort of a CRUD admin interface that can be plugged in and customized.  active_admin for Rails is pretty good.  http://activeadmin.info/
• Has a sane way of managing 3rd party dependencies.
• The application boots fast (for minimal downtime during deployments) and doesn’t use tons of ram.
• Has a way to to stuff long running tasks in the backgrou d and report the progress of the task to the user.  (note: i’m apparently not smart enough to understand amqp, at least in Ruby).
• Solutions for form validations and ajax.
• Support for i18n/localization.

I’m sorta thinking something in Scala or Haskell are the only options here.  Haskell’s cabal still sorta sucks, and Scala’s complexity sorta scares me.