I used knockout in a previous project, and it was really good, but (going from memory of using knockout), Angular has quite a bit with respect to managing your entire app and modularizing it. Knockout seems more like react to me, and I suspect it just didn't get as much support because it was from Microsoft.
Knockout didn't come from Microsoft, it's not a Microsoft product, but it did come from a Microsoft employee. I suppose for the Silicon Valley crowd that's enough of a "black mark" to avoid it. Meh. I don't care if tons of people use it because it's just one simple piece of the puzzle (that I can maintain myself if needed). Also Knockout added a feature called "Components" to version 3.2 which enables modularization similar to Angular.
That Angular wants to manage the whole app is exactly why I probably won't use it for my own projects. I don't want to build "Angular apps" I want to build web apps. Angular seems unstable too, with regards to backward compatibility - barely supporting IE8 in 1.2, dropping it in 1.3 and then introducing all sorts of major breaking changes in 2.0 - no, this kit is not for people like me who want stability. Meanwhile, even Knockout's newest features work all the way back to IE6.
