Which IDE do you use? I have been messing around with alchemist on emacs but the learning curve is pretty steep (i'm not an emacs guru).

I can recommend: Atom with https://github.com/msaraiva/atom-elixir

Is this a community/culture issue where you can keep things in check if you make a concerted effort to dissuade people from using something too much?

Sort of like Rails was big on testing, which was generally a win.

Aside from pretty simple `__using__` macros, most Elixir devs come to appreciate macros and then elect not to use them in the most situations. Most people who do use macros have a very small Macro that just returns the AST for a function call after some tiny little adjustments to the arguments is made.

There are a few exceptions where there are very large projects that make heavy use of macros (Phoenix's router, Ecto), but they are by far the exception. Most of the macros you use every day are simple ones.