I'm surprised that the "nothing complex / hack up a quick prototype" recommendation is Angular. I get that it's powerful, but there's so much deep magic inside

I'm surprised that the "nothing complex / hack up a quick prototype" recommendation is Angular. I get that it's powerful, but there's so much deep magic inside angular [1] that I find even simple stuff takes significant forethought and wrangling. As a substitute, why not Ractive.js? It's simple and does what you'd expect. You put {{#each foo:i}} <span class="{{classname}}"> {{foo[i]}} </span> {{/each}} in one place, and ractive.set({ foo: ['a', 'b', 'c'], classname: "output", }) in another, and things just work. No messing with insanity like: angular.element(myDomElement).scope().$apply(); /rant. Maybe I'm missing something deep here. [1] Introspecting the parameter names of the callback function I passed in? Really?