People can’t blame Phoenix for that 
I made the same mistake with Rails - dove straight into it without learning Ruby and then found I was asking really dumb questions in their IRC channel. After a couple of days of doing that Ryan Bigg said “Hey Aston, if you read this book I promise you’ll be able to do everything you’ve been asking… and more!”. He was right 
He also hand-held me send my first PR to an OS project - he’s such a cool guy! (No surprise he is one of my dev heroes!)
Sounds really cool! I hope you’ll consider project structure to be more component based (so rather than the typical MVC folder structure, folders will be dictated by components - this just makes it easier to work on specific things imo and I wish Phoenix had an option for this to be set on project creation).