Agreed with @AstonJ . I have an aside to share.
This will never be either a positive nor a negative. It seriously depends on how this freedom is used. Take a look at Javascript’s supposed freedom – it led to a huge sprawl of libraries and frameworks which ultimately (and very logically) led to the NPM left-pad fiasco.
A sad fact of life is that most humans do not seem to be able to utilize their full freedom without introducing anarchy in the system, and without the ego being the first priority behind almost every action of any singular agent inside the system. This is why, if you ask any Eastern European, I could bet that 8 / 10 of us will tell you that some control and authoritarianism are actually good for the system as a whole, provided the “dictator” or “the ruling class” are benevolent (which is a stretch and has been historically proven as impossible in politics at least; seems to work well with the right people in tech though, the leading example being Linus Torvalds).
Back to the topic at hand:
Me too. But I want that flexibility only inside Phoenix and co. I don’t need that flexibility in the form of yet-another-framework. I personally would dislike seeing a lot of frameworks coming into being that try and do things that Phoenix already does quite well. We need to be productive. The eternal illusion of the “infinitely free choice” is holding the industry back. We want to ship and deliver, our employers’ systems are not playgrounds, we should stop pretending we are 19 and we should specifically stop pretending that programming is only a passion and not at all a job. I am not taking shots at any enthusiastic open-source maintainer here – sometimes the alternate tech serves really good to make you think about other possibilities and this cognitive ability expansion is priceless! – and I admire the people who use their personal time to try and move an area forward. But I for one will still not replace Phoenix or Plug and would rather struggle with them for a bit until next version fixes a problem, compared to fully jumping ship somewhere else and fragmenting the community’s efforts and energy.
The community needs unity. All tech communities need less fashion and ego. This is ultimately a job and we must pick not only the best tools for the job; sometimes we have to settle for picking the good enough tools for the job if it means we will make the job of the guy / girl after us easier and more pleasant.
Agreed! I will cheer them if I meet them in person (okay I met Jose once but it was 2 years ago) and will tell them they make the tech world a much better place.
And I prefer to stick to their work – Jose, Eric, Michal, Chris and everybody else who works on Elixir, Plug, Phoenix, Ecto, and even contributes to Erlang / OTP.
We need more unity.
It blew my mind when I discovered you can have more than one Phoenix layer in an Elixir app 
