You would be surprised, actually. I think there's quite a bit of work going into BEAMJIT, an LLVM based JIT for Erlang that far exceeds HiPE. I won't argue with you though that the VM could use improvements gleaned from the last ten-fifteen years of implementation and research.
To me, it really just seems like a difference in labor and time. BEAM doesn't have nearly as much investment of brainpower going into it. It's also been mainstream for much less time. There's less corporate R&D working on it. So, we'll see things progress more slowly and it be behind in various ways until some of this changes.
True for most stuff out there that's not the No 1 or No 2 choice for mainstream developers. Yet, results such as HipHop and PyPy show vast improvement can be made when even one company puts a lot of effort into something. A combo of academics applying to Erlang/BEAM the best in FP compilation and best in VM architecture might bring similarly dramatic improvements. A good precedent is how I saw the Racket Scheme team knock out significant weaknesses in their compiler practically as they were posted on forums. Not saying it always happens but that sort of thing in Erlang space would be interesting.
