You're definitely not alone in disliking the syntax.

I agree with most of your points, from what I've seen, except the last one.

One thing that Elixir seems to get right is a sane string implementation out of the box.

> Coming from the Ruby world, a lot of these new developers tend to be ignorant of the underlying Erlang machinery, believing that Elixir is the magic that makes Erlang a "modern" and usable language, which is simply not true.

This sounds very subjective, and doesn't agree with my experience. I don't know a single Elixir dabbler that doesn't give Erlang credit where credit is due. It's just that the syntax looks like Prolog and ML got into a nasty car wreck sometime in the 1980's, and the tooling is more like a box of parts that can be assembled into various tools. That's why I use Elixir instead, anyway.

> The tendency to favor frameworks over libraries.

I know of exactly one framework in Elixir; I assume you mean Phoenix. Phoenix is little more than a few blobs of glue around other, mostly core Elixir, libraries. The Elixir community at large is quite wary of language and framework magic. The fact that lots of us did time with Rails means we've been hurt by the downsides of that approach like few others. :)

> In the end, I think Elixir adds very little besides the excellent tooling to the Erlang ecosystem.

That's good enough for me!

I think your second point is unfair. It has nothing to do with Ruby but the fact a lot of people are joining the platform. It takes time for them to understand how everything fits together. Most experienced developers I talk to are actually appreciative of Erlang. Elixir also helps a lot since it points developers to use the Erlang libraries instead of wrapping them.

But mostly you shouldn't expect people to grasp functional programming, concurrency and OTP when they are just getting started.