I have been working in Erlang for almost 5 years now. I want to add my experience as anecdote. I joined the current company because it was solving an interesting problem and just happened to use Erlang. I didn't self select for curiosity or learning a new language. Erlang was the tool available to me do the work that I wanted to do.

Cheers to all you Basho/Riak folks. I have worked with one before!