I also agree with this premise. I favor the gradual typing philosophy more and more. For me at least, productivity wise, being able to write something, play around with it, make changes, etc without worrying to much about satisfying type requirements is great. When the idea and and implementation feels solid go back and gradually add in type requirements.

I would love to see Erlang get a LLVM based JIT compiler backend. I think this http://llvm.org/devmtg/2014-04/PDFs/Talks/drejhammar.pdf is the latest work done in that area.