There's no in joke (I don't know helwr). My first sentence was meant to be sarcastic. I was encouraging helwr to explain his/her opinion, since saying "YC startups suck" without any further explanation doesn't really contribute anything.
They have quite high karma (as in "they are on the leader board") but their profile states nothing about them. I was assuming you knew something about them from their comment history. (I am sort of guessing they either were funded by YC or applied and got rejected or some such, but I don't really feel like doing some massive search of the site or combing through all their comments/posts to confirm my hunch.)
They have 919 submissions, the top 142 of which have between 11 and 252 points. They only have 206 comments by comparison; their second-highest-rated comment was a direct link to a pdf of Hacker Monthly #2.
H. Thoreau once said "In proportion as he simplifies his life, the laws of the universe will appear less complex.." (Walden, Princeton University Press, 1971, p.323-324)
I'm a big believer in KISS. If you don't have the problems Erlang was designed to solve, Erlang is probably not a good choice. Rolling your own amateur version of Erlang on top of evented Python or Javascript is probably also not a good move though.
I think you are confusing sophistication and complexity. Part of the sophistication of Erlang is how it simplifies the complexities of concurrent programming and, more importantly, the handling of failures in concurrent programming.
