That’s very true - but I don’t think Dave, or anyone else is suggesting we can’t do what we want in Elixir ourselves (on the contrary, that Elixir actually makes it easier to do these extremely cool things!) but more that we have an opportunity, as a community (and as language and framework creators in the case of José, Chris and the core developers) that we can spearhead outstanding ‘modern’ development practices.
I find that extremely appealing as a user of these technologies and I genuinely feel that it is something that can help Elixir and Phoenix stand out even more from the crowd. It’s also already in line with how José and Chris think too - because they already spearheaded this movement with their work on Contexts (etc) 
Elixir and Phoenix could be the first language and framework where philosophy of and approaches towards software creation is as first class a citizen as is features.
I like to use the term “web-facing system” (instead of a web app or web server) to denote a system which just happens to provide its service over the web.
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