Contrary to many here, I feel over the last year they made themselves totally relevant again. And I think that the negative reactions here are from people that

Contrary to many here, I feel over the last year they made themselves totally relevant again. And I think that the negative reactions here are from people that aren't fully aware of the current state of the project. Note that Meteor is much more than a data layer. Even though you won't find any easier system to deal with reactive data than their livequery system, I get that you don't want to be bound to Mongo or even need reactivity. But it's also a server and build tool that has given our application: - A stable upgrade path for almost 4 years where we could keep up with new ES features incrementally, with full backwards compatibility. In Javascript-framework land this is really unique. We've been able to keep adding features, expanding our product and building for our customers. While at the same time continuously update our codebase to the latest and greatest. - By far the best easiest way to do code splitting (since 1.5) without any configuration or overlap in bundles. I don't know about any other tool that offers something similar. Webpack doesn't even come close in this area. - Because they had node-fibers to get synchronous code from the start, now it's really easy to adopt to async/await. - They have good integrations for React, Angular 1 & 2, Blaze and there are third-party integrations for Vue (haven't used that one myself) - They're also the same people behind Apollo which people do seem to like for their data layer. And they announced Meteor will focus on full Apollo integration. But yeah, their current data layer requires you to buy in to Mongo. And yes, there's no good separation of concerns in their data layer. And yes, the oplog tailing can't handle "facebook-scale" and I know you believe you need this. But picking this allowed our application (that needs a reactive data layer) to be delivered fast, gain customers and grow. Without Meteor, I'm pretty sure I would have ended up 2 years later with a nicer codebase and no customers. TL;DR Have a look at their latest release (1.6), build a small application and chances are you might really like it.