Maybe I've just forgotten what learning Elixir was like, but I feel like OTP never gave me all that much trouble? I guess it might be a little weird, but conceptually it's not that different from how objects work and presumably Python data people do fine with that. I feel like the sticking point might be the syntax. Elixir has a very developer-friendly syntax, but the flexibility (all the ways to call functions, implicit returns, arity stuff, collection syntax, even macros) makes it way harder to just learn "incantations" and be able to read other people's code.