I'm aware of that, and can see why people like it in Ash, but as with Django I think it makes things less explicit, harder to break up domain specific structure

I'm aware of that, and can see why people like it in Ash, but as with Django I think it makes things less explicit, harder to break up domain specific structures backed by the database, and more magical. It's fine IMHO as an add on with something like Ash, but a data mapper like Ecto shouldn't strive to be an ORM like Django especially in a functional language.