I accept it, but the fact of the matter is that -- like it or not -- there are at least two orders of magnitude more people who use the JVM than BEAM. You're comparing the world's most popular runtime with a runtime that's not even in the top-ten.

Some of your complaints stem from exactly that difference -- the JVM is designed to operate much higher workloads than BEAM, and people use that -- hence Clojure's slow startup etc (the JVM starts up in < 80ms, BTW). But, again, your observations don't change the fact that if Erlang stays on BEAM it will forever be a niche language.