> it's a horrible and overblown framework with a high barrier to entry.
I'm honestly surprised how often I keep hearing about its high barrier to entry. I've worked on ~5 different MVC style web frameworks, all server side, over ~5 years of professional programming. I just started a front-end position using Angular for the last three months, and have found it pretty straight-forward to pick up. That is, the concepts I learned server-side have translated fairly cleanly to the front-end.
Most of the people I've seen struggle with the framework so far are those that didn't have that server side experience. Which isn't to say its required, but only to say some of the concepts they struggle the most with are concepts you need for any MVC style web framework - server side or front-end. Its not that they are that similar, but that they encounter and solve many of the same problems. Routing, separation of concerns, dependency injection, testing, getting what you want into the template, etc. And Angular isn't what you'd call a micro framework (see Django vs Flask or Bottle from Python world, for example). So of course Angular is large; it tries to solve alot of problems for you (how well it does so is another story).
Anyways, the take-away (from my point of view) is that much of the work that used to be done by server-side guys can now be done by front-end guys. So they have to learn all the same concepts and struggle with all the same problems to be effective.
I'm honestly surprised how often I keep hearing about its high barrier to entry. I've worked on ~5 different MVC style web frameworks, all server side, over ~5 years of professional programming. I just started a front-end position using Angular for the last three months, and have found it pretty straight-forward to pick up. That is, the concepts I learned server-side have translated fairly cleanly to the front-end.
Most of the people I've seen struggle with the framework so far are those that didn't have that server side experience. Which isn't to say its required, but only to say some of the concepts they struggle the most with are concepts you need for any MVC style web framework - server side or front-end. Its not that they are that similar, but that they encounter and solve many of the same problems. Routing, separation of concerns, dependency injection, testing, getting what you want into the template, etc. And Angular isn't what you'd call a micro framework (see Django vs Flask or Bottle from Python world, for example). So of course Angular is large; it tries to solve alot of problems for you (how well it does so is another story).
Anyways, the take-away (from my point of view) is that much of the work that used to be done by server-side guys can now be done by front-end guys. So they have to learn all the same concepts and struggle with all the same problems to be effective.