While I'm not expert, node goes faster and makes real time stuff like instant messaging easier.

Like for example I had a look at hackthon starters in rails, django and node and the node one has this cool dashboard https://hackathon-starter-2018.herokuapp.com/status

I think stuff like that is hard to do in rails. Also I was trying to do instant messaging in web2py and gave up and just wrote a service in node which was like 10 lines with express/socket.io.

Pragmatically I think it may be easiest to write the main app in rails of similar and link to a separate bit of node for stuff like the above.

We do precisely none of that sort of thing. Our department's workload revolves around the shifting needs of a demanding media agency, who just wants pretty looking content that's easy to manage. Everything even remotely hard they use their own media talent for. What we do is perfectly suited for Rails.

Beats the hell out of me. I didn't make the decision, and objected as strongly as I could.