Love to the point of invention! This looks and feels great.

I'm an Elixir newbie and wondering if I should start with learning Ash or stick with Liveview until I know more. Any thoughts on what Ash solved for you over Phoenix Liveview?

Ash can be used in conjunction with Phoenix, they aren't mutually exclusive. Ash is really just a framework for modeling your domain(s) and getting a bunch of helpful functionality for free (e.g advanced querying capabilities, pagination, data validations, json+graphql apis, and more) Then you could use those functionalities with phoenix to build a full web app. Or you could use something else other than phoenix, it's up to you :)

Def start with Phoenix first and then try Ash.