I'm developing and maintaining an Ember app which is nearly 5 years old. Some of our app code dates back to 2011 (when Ember was still Amber.js). Remember how

I'm developing and maintaining an Ember app which is nearly 5 years old. Some of our app code dates back to 2011 (when Ember was still Amber.js). Remember how much the Javascript ecosystem changed in 5 years? There is no way we could have maintained the same code base without Ember; we would have needed to rewrite the app once or twice by now. And with each rewrite small features, little subtleties would have been lost, replaced by some bike-shedding about how we should hand-compose an entirely new stack. Instead, we upgraded quietly from time to time, and kept all our carefully tuned code and beloved UI tweaks with us. To be honest, the maintenance and version bumps took quite some work, and some early upgrades required heavy refactoring. Ember paradigms changed frequently during the pre-1.0 era, and later React clearly influenced the best practices recommended for Ember 2 (like Data-Down Actions-Up, etc). But boy is it worth it. Ember-Data is neat, the testing tools are great, the Ember-Inspector add-on is a joy, and the CLI tools gets us so many free features. And we never could have maintained this product without a stable framework across all these years, and the friendly developers community. Also, to answer your question about add-ons: they're great. Among the core team there is a nice commitment to make many new features available as add-ons (rather than baking them into the framework). And the community solves many common problems for you indeed.