Meh, over the last two years I've worked on a team that put two medium complexity SPAs into production built with Angular; in my experience, the string-based expressions are a non-issue, I can't really think of any time when it caused difficulties in our development. Yeah, it's less than elegant, but if you keep the expressions simple (e.g. use functions for anything more complex than single term expressions) then there really isn't much to stumble over.