I'm not surprised about your comment on Ecto. Ecto takes experience and practice, but by the time you finish writing your 5th or 6th application, Ecto will be so natural that you wouldn't want to go back. Especially not to writing vanilla SQL.
The problem with complicate things is that the second application never comes. I've got a customer that's been paying me to write a Phoenix application for the last two years. That's good but I'm not going to use Ecto in one of my own projects. So no Elixir if it touches a database. There are simpler alternatives to Ecto, maybe I'll use one of them but Ruby and ActiveRecord are good almost for everything.
