It's really awesome how Phoenix has come a really long way in a really short period of time. Chris and José (and many others) do an excellent job of carefully considering features and how those features get implemented. While many refer to Phoenix as a "web framework" I don't think of it that way in the traditional sense of web frameworks like Rails. I find it closer to a "web library" that does an excellent job of handling Web concerns such as routing, WebSockets, rendering HTML/JSON and internationalization. I think this is a good thing in this day and age of having very diverse model layers.

If you have time and want to see a very well run open source project in action, I recommend you read through present and past discussions on the Phoenix GitHub project: https://github.com/phoenixframework/phoenix/issues