... so I was wondering if a monk who has experience with both might chime in and offer at least a somewhat objective view on what makes webobjects so great, and why it isn't used more.

I agree with the quoted author, its the "A" word which causes all the problems. Which is actually silly since WebObjects was originally a NeXT product (IIRC that is), and NeXT, while not much of commercial success seems to be well respected amoung developers.

But anyway, to more answer your question. I have never actually used WebObject in a production site. But I did do some extensive research on it and built (along with another developer) some basic demo apps as part of that research. We ended up going with BEA WebLogic instead because of a corporate mandate from the client.

My impression of WebObjects though was that it was a really nice and very mature platform. The small apps we built (a basic guestbook type app and a primative message board) took no time at all once we got our heads around WebObject's development model. There was a good amount of WYSIWYG stuff, which I normally do not like, but the WebObjects approach was actually pretty nice and did not make me feel "out of control" of what I was building.

As I said, in the end, the order came down from our client's corp HQ to use BEA WebLogic, so it was a non-issue. But prior to that I had a hard time convincing their IT folk that Apple could make a decent app server. Another point too (suprisingly) was that WebObjects at the time only cost about $800 USD, and I think the project manager(s) did not think it had enough zeros to make it a good product.

All in all, I have to somewhat agree with the author you quoted. WebObject is a clean, mature platform which makes building web apps very easy, and there is little out there in the Open Source world which is even close right now.