Python - Django
Ruby - Rails
PHP - Laravel
all nice choices
Ruby - Rails
PHP - Laravel
all nice choices
Elixir - Phoenix
I wish there was a complete Clojure - ???
Elixir itself is an excellent language that leveraged the strengths of the Erlang VM, and Phoenix is like a massively improved, blazing fast and reliable version of Rails.
It will be the logical successor to Rails. It already is.
That said, I use a good mix of Elixir+Phoenix and old-school cron launched Python utility scripts, and that works nicely. Anything that's difficult (probably because I am still a newb) in Elixir I can easily do out of band with a Python script.
But your point about difficult to hire experienced people is the reason for my reply. This is the mentality that is ruining IT and development. Yes, having someone with hands on experience in all of your tools is nice - a rare luxury in fact. But it's really not necessary. I would be quite happy to have someone that has willingly built something in Rails, Django, and Nodejs with an "Oh I can learn that" attitude. Especially if you come from a modern MVC framework, Phoenix itself is easy. Elixir is the part that requires some real effort, imo.
I personally find that Laravel is less heavy than Django which is way less heavy than RoR. I would never use RoR for small projects.
btw: what do you use for the database access? Slick, Quill, Doobie, ScalikeJDBC, Anorm, Squeryl, jOOQ, Relate, Activate or something else? There seem to be gazillions of sql libraries for scala (although the big three and most relevant are probably Slick, Quill and Doobie).
And what do you use for Authorization? Something custom build? If I look at Laravel there are quite a few maintained authorization libs with ~1000 stars on youtube (even more if we count unmaintained), for play there is not really much (deadbolt, play4j and t2v/play2-auth, I don't count Silhouette since the lib is mainly about authentication).