I often do a word count of languages and technologies in the monthly "Who's hiring" posts here. Elixir/Phoenix gets less mentions than Erlang - often there would be at least one position that says they use Elixir, sometimes none.
Small point: this is how all popular languages once started. Much like the stock market, there's value in being balanced on the forefront of a technology along with a solid footing in an established technology. Having no balance in either direction is the only "risky" career move.
I once ran a language popularity site thing, and I think jobs are something of a trailing indicator. It takes a while for people to hire for whatever hot new thing is out.
I've beeen learning Elixir in the past few months and I can tell I'm definitely confident it's a good investment. Will use it fairly soon in production, first to implement ETL / streaming / batch processing of data (without Phoenix) then later for APIs (with Phoenix).
Now that the JavaScript trend is transitioning from "cool hipster language" to "a language that Wal-Mart uses", room is being made for a new language fad. Elixir/Phoenix seems like it may be a good candidate.
Why not learn to use Erlang instead of trying to make Erlang "feel kind of like Ruby" ?
As far as LFE goes.. implementing a LISP-1 on top of erlang seems like a perfectly reasonable thing to do, but why invent some new funky syntax (elixer) ?