Ecto is hands down the best "ORM" I've used. At no point has it ever gotten in the way of us dynamically creating queries on the fly, just following the Ecto internals (not recommended, but totally doable) and has an extremely expressive syntax. The team behind it has been rolling out new features and are extremely responsive to requests on the mailing list. I encourage you to give it a chance.

The mental shift is that "schemas" are not objects in an ORM sense, but instead are just data, or views over data. The functions come from taking in data or a Changeset and manipulating those, versus calling a function on a class.

As far as errors, Elixir 1.4.5 has much better error messages, specifically printing the args to crashes and such, and OTP 20/ Elixir 1.5 should drastically improve Dialyzer error messages. I am not a Ruby guy, so perhaps you can say what you feel is missing from Elixir's messages and how the Ruby gem improves it. Also you can literally inspect running state on the fly with the BEAM tooling, so the need for things like debuggers goes down.