[lostcolony]

Are you familiar with Ruby on Rails? Phoenix was built as a simpler equivalent, to leverage websockets, and to leverage the BEAM to be performant with high concurrency (i.e., what you generally want in a web server).

Is it encompassing a lot of magic? Yes. But the quick growth in mindshare that Ruby on Rails attained back in 2005-2010 (part of which it still retains) was due to how easy it was for a novice developer to pick it up and build something useful. Pick it up and understand all the pieces, no. Phoenix is less Express/Martini in nature, more Spring/Rails (but more pleasant than either of those to work with, I would contend, but again, that's opinion).