I still firmly believe Angular 1 got the right pieces into the framework (directives and services), but that the community latched onto some of the extraneous p

I still firmly believe Angular 1 got the right pieces into the framework (directives and services), but that the community latched onto some of the extraneous pieces (controllers, controllerAs, etc), which don't offer enough cost/benefit and simply make things much harder to grok. You often end up babying references and being bitten by implementation details of JS and somewhat-confusing names for things (e.g. $scope does not behave like the variable scope of any ES version). Angular 1 still beats the pants off of everything else in my experience, if you know how to trim the fat. I'd very much like to write more about my approach in the near future.