I think Phoenix strikes a really great balance with its abstractions. I also think great things happens when a community adopts the same conventions. Rails has shown that beyond anything in my opinion. Things like our project bootstrap command `mix phoenix.new my_app` lets you get a bare app up and running in seconds. With a quick guide on the Router and Controller layer, most folks can get up and running very quickly, but our guides have lagged behind development. It's something we're working hard to improve. Lance has been working hard on full-featured guides and we should have them live very soon.