Ask HN: Is there a sane alternative to Angular and React?

>Slightly tongue-in-cheek but nonetheless serious question. I've recently started looking into JavaScript UI frameworks and have the uneasy feeling they are actually worse than the now defunct Flash and Silverlight.

Angular, at least up to 2.0 which I've checked, it's a conceptual mess.

React, on the other hand, is conceptually better than Flash and Silveright, and even has more powerful abstractions in several areas.

The problem is that React handles a small part of the logic that Flash and Silverlight do (or, something like Flex would), and does so at various levels of the whole stack (some low level like diff-ing repaints, others at higher level like component nesting), and all the wiring and extra handling is left to the programmer to handle.

For all the progress with React and co, it's still the wild west as far as programming efficiency is concerned. Elm is not much better either.

Correction: if you're looking for what was once touted as the future, but never came to be and probably never will, and has been surpassed by React (and/or Angular), check Web Components and Polymer.

It's a committee driven over-engineered spec that's not going to be any more succesful than XHTML...

Server-side rendering with partial views?

You're never going to get something as simple as Flash, with a write-once works everywhere. But your user's aren't going to be annoyed at the crappy UX that Flash (or Flex) applications brought us.

EDIT: I'm dead serious about this, with the concept of isomorphic apps, I'm not convinced building thick Javascript-based clients is necessarily the way to go for a lot of use cases, including the traditional business information worker-type of application. With these modern JS frameworks working on the concept of rendering virtual DOM diffs, why not just render the partial diff on the server and swap out the specific DOM on the client page?

I agree, I feel React, much like Flex's MXML forces the developers to componetize the entire UI as part of the development process in a way that feels natural.