Ok, I've heard of Haskell and I've been to many Haskell meetups too. This was before I found Elixir. For me, the biggest problem with Haskell is that it will turn cryptic if you don't touch the codebase for say, 6 months. Because, you need to essentially re-learn the special syntax of the language if you're touching Haskell code after 6 months.
In contrast, Elixir is super simple. I can describe the language in a single HN comment. Everything is just a function and they're inside modules. That's pretty much it. When I was picking up Elixir, I started off writing an E-Commerce platform from scratch with Elixir. When I was about to finish it, I was thrown into a 8 month long PHP project. When I was finally done with it and returned back to work on my E-Commerce project, I was able to just open up the code in a text editor and immediately understand what was happening - without having to re-learn the language. That is a the "Joy" part for me.
One more "Joy" of writing in Elixir is you don't need to worry about memory usage or performance that much. It's pretty efficient unlike Ruby or PHP even. So, I can just throw this entire application in a $5 Digital Ocean droplet and watch it handle insane amounts of traffic. And this is without optimizing anything. You will probably able to squeeze more with caching, optimizations, etc.
As for re-thinking the way you write code, it's mostly to do with pipe operations. Piping was a new concept for me jumping from Ruby. It's absolutely powerful, concise and productive. In Elixir, if you don't write good code, the compiler will warn you AND show you examples of how (and sometimes why) it should be re-written. Eg. If you write a nested case statement which many people subconsciously may do coming from OOP backgrounds, the compiler will ask you to re-think your code. And stuff like this really challenges you, but actually doesn't do anything destructive to your code - your code will still compile and function, but you will feel that tingling inside - "Hmm, maybe I should consider re-writing that?"
THAT is the balance. Before Elixir, I also used Scala. Took me 3 months to fully learn the language from the 700+ pages book on Scala. I absolutely love Scala and the JVM. It's powerful, but there's just too many ways to do the same thing in Scala to keep track of. So, it goes back to my first point on looking at the language after 6 months without the need to re-learn it. I would still try Scala at some point because JVM is very powerful. But, will it replace Elixir? Absolutely not.