Haha I’d agree with most others here in that Phoenix is actually a really nice bit of tech to use with Elixir, particularly given how lean it is. Remember that Phoenix isn’t like Rails or other common ‘web frameworks’ - in fact legendary folk like PragDave have gone on record as saying that it’s not a web framework… it’s much more than that 
We’ve actually had some really interesting discussions about Phoenix and how it can be used. Did you know for example, that you can have multiple Phoenix layers in your Elixir app? Imagine doing that with some other web framework 
Not sure if you’ve seen it, but I highly recommend Dave’s online course - his thoughts are probably not too dissimilar to yours (he uses Phoenix as a strict web layer, taking the ‘Phoenix is not your application’ to a whole new level).
On top of all that, there’s the reason why we use ‘web frameworks’ to begin with - the conveniences and benefits you get, such as generators, security, a unified way of building apps, best practices baked in, etc.
As James mentioned this is kinda off-topic, so if a big enough discussion ensues we can split it into a dedicated thread 
