Your sense of nice conflicts with Erlang's goal of supporting reliable systems. For example, Erlang is not designed using the paradigm du jour. It may seem like Erlang borrows from functional programming, but Erlang's designers invented all that independently because it supported writing reliable systems. Concise and maintainable are antagonistic qualities, and so Erlang's designers sacrificed all the conciseness they could get away with.
Erlang is not deisgned to be nice, elegant or have any other property people normally advertise their language as having. Erlang is designed so that programmers at Ericsson could write better code for phone switches, with constant feedback from said programmers. That's Erlang's mission statement, originally.
If you want concise actors, Scala with Akka allows you to write pretty unreadable code if you want to.