> The issue with frameworks like Rails <... snip ...> is that you get so much for free and don't have to understand how all the pieces fit and work together

Having used both Ruby/Rails and Clojure, I think Clojure swings too far in the opposite direction, where absolutely everything is foisted on the developer and they must hold the entire codebase in their head at once or drown.

We even see this in luminus, the closest thing Clojure has to a web framework. It's just a leiningen template which spits files out on disk and says "there you go, it's your problem now". Of course there are upsides to this approach, but personally I've come to find developing web servers in Clojure a withering, joyless experience. Elixir and Phoenix show much more promise and seem to strike the right balance between featureful-ness and cleanliness.