If I can weigh in as a fairly unskilled Clojure user: Biff has been a miracle for me. It's true that decisions have been made by the Biff creators, and that's what's been wonderful. They have been really good ones so far for me. Many of the choices are modifiable... but I'm not likely to do that. I just need things to work. The tools I had to install turned out to be ones I should have on hand anyway. I would have reached for PostgreSQL on my own but have gotten really into xtdb. JUXT has just added SQL to xtdb so now I have that if I want.

I use Emacs but I discovered to my surprise that the creator of Biff does not. I don't see a lot of Emacs specific stuff in the documentation.

I recommend the tutorial project (eelchat). Otherwise, they are really helpful in Slack... someone usually answers any issue in a couple of hours or much less.

What's most important is that Biff brought me was a working front-end out of the box that I could start tweaking right away. When I used Luminus I had more steps and they were really hard to figure out as a beginner. However, shout out for Luminus... it was my go-to before Biff and I have huge gratitude.

I didn't know about htmx and it has been a game changer. This is probably my favorite feature.

This was the first time I was able to fluidly get something going, tweak the backend and UI, and deploy. Other approaches had some but not all of those.

The deployment situation is a dream. It was incredible to have my site up with a few steps. For a less skilled developer like me this was totally awesome. Biff has a continous code-push/deploy feature that is incredible.

Sorry if this seems like a fanboy post. It's probably because for Biff I am one. My feeling is that for Clojure to grow userwise there need to be a lot more projects like this one.