I think Ember made a big mistake with the router. The most interesting part of Ember IMHO is the data-binding and the components. With those two things you coul

I think Ember made a big mistake with the router. The most interesting part of Ember IMHO is the data-binding and the components. With those two things you could do very complicated document-centric desktop-like apps very easily. If you wanted to make a web app resembling Adobe Illustrator, I have no doubt that Ember is better for the task that any other framework. In fact I did something in that vein which, sadly is an internal tool, using a pre-router version of Ember. Then the router came along around 1.0, and it make everything too complicated. As the OP says, for desktop-like apps routing makes no sense. Also all the levels of indirection and abstraction makes no sense. I'd like at least to have the option to expose objects globally as I please. What I want is one, maybe two global models and a lot of components that have access to those globals. End of rant.