I have, and quite liked it. The problem seems to be that Elixir has much more momentum and better tooling (from a web-dev perspective). Am I wrong about that?
Elixir definitely has more momentum at the moment (mostly due to an influx of Rails refugees IMHO), but as someone who came over to Elixir from Erlang rather than from Ruby I think you will find that it is not hard to switch back and forth between Elixir and Erlang once you get used to it. Elixir, if you can get past the Ruby -ish syntax, lifted a lot from Clojure as far as what is happening underneath the surface and you can call back and forth between Erlang and Elixir at eny time. This lets you do things like write large chunks of your app in Erlang and then glue everything together using Elixir/Phoenix to take advantage of the larger Elixir web-dev community. Phoenix itself is based upon a lower-level HTTP library written in Erlang.
Not perfect, but it does allow you to leverage the advantages of Elixir (e.g. Phoenix and the related web-dev community) while still letting you get most of your work done in Erlang.
There is no reason to use LFE. It doesn't add anything that Erlang does not have (besides macros) and it is very poor on the documentation side.
Even if you don't like Elixir, it brings more to the table than just syntax and macros, such as tooling, Unicode support, protocols, better error messages, better debugging, tasks, etc.
If Elixir is not your cup of tea, definitely Erlang all the way.
> I have, and quite liked it. The problem seems to be that Elixir has much more momentum and better tooling (from a web-dev perspective). Am I wrong about that?
No, you're not wrong. Elixir also supports meta-programming, whereas Erlang does not. I like both languages though, primarily due to the BEAM VM. You can't go wrong with either one.
