I agree with your post, but wanted to pick up on one point:
Erlang may as well not exist for the vast majority of developers. I like Erlang, but a lot of people don't get it, and even more are completely unaware that it exists.
This was also true of Ruby pre 2005. I'm not an Erlang developer but it clearly has some natural advantages in the increasingly important world of parallelism and maybe it just needs its own "Rails" as a catalyst for its take off? (And by "its own Rails" I don't mean a Web framework but just a MacGuffin that lures people in to trying it.)
Half of it was true for Ruby — many people were unaware. What they don't have in common is people's immediate reaction upon discovering the language.
Common first exposure to Ruby: "Oh, wow, that's cool. It looks pretty easy."
Common first exposure to Erlang: "Oh, wow, I didn't know you could code in Klingon."
I do agree, though, that Erlang could probably gain a lot more popularity if somebody introduced a framework that really showed what it could do. The most popular web framework right now (at least I think it's the most popular — there aren't any official polls or anything) is MochiWeb, which kindasorta doesn't have any documentation.
MochiWeb is a web server, not a web framework. People use nitrogen(1) and webmachine(2) over it. Nitrogen is a pretty fully featured framework, and webmachine is a really light layer that bakes in http/REST semantics.
I pretty much exclusively use webmachine with ErlyDTL (an implementation of the Django templating system) on top.
There's also erlangweb, and a few others. Both nitrogen and webmachine are pretty well documented. I think it's still all of the periods and arrows that are scaring people off.
Given the visceral reactions to the syntax, perhaps Erlang could be boosted via a CoffeeScript-esque language that compiles down to it? No idea how practical that is with Erlang's idioms but CS helped some previously JS-shy folks get on board.
There already is one: Elixir (http://elixir-lang.org). It's created by Jose Valim, who (as you probably know) is also a member of the Rails core team. It's a very interesting language.
Erlang may as well not exist for the vast majority of developers. I like Erlang, but a lot of people don't get it, and even more are completely unaware that it exists.
This was also true of Ruby pre 2005. I'm not an Erlang developer but it clearly has some natural advantages in the increasingly important world of parallelism and maybe it just needs its own "Rails" as a catalyst for its take off? (And by "its own Rails" I don't mean a Web framework but just a MacGuffin that lures people in to trying it.)