After some consideration and because I am spending much time learning flex I think I will go ahead and learn coldfusion. I think its integration with flex will make CF a great product for RIA development.
I agree. CF has been a rather slow and hard to come by language on the net. I've seen few servers that support it, and find that an increased cost is associated with it. Flex is a pain to connect with PHP compared to CF, so we may see a resurgence of CF.
I'm curious how silverlight will effect this though. There is a 95% probability that I would choose C# as my backend over CF.
Also I feel that CF server settings are easier to understand and control than apache.
That is because ColdFusion costs a lot of money per server in order to use. (Unless something has changed in the last couple years) So naturally hosting for it would be more.