The State of Meteor Part 2: What Happens Next

I agree with this completely.

Worth noting: for jQuery, the solution was aligned with the landscape of the time. Javascript support was a mess. Vendor implementation and feature support varied. A key benefit provided by jQuery was easy, performant 'write-once' code - the library provided an abstraction over often non-trivial issues.

Parallels can be drawn to the issues that the current generation of frameworks are oriented around. As upcoming browser features stabilise and become commonplace (i.e. web components, web workers etc), I think that the popular frameworks will consequently and inevitably evolve.

Three days ago I spent a couple of hours on Meteor's simple-todos tutorial, trying to understand how everything was working (that is, at an abstract level). I felt great after finishing it. Two days ago I started building a service we'd like to launch within a couple of months, e-commerce like stuff. I felt miserable. Pushed the first "draft" with a customized sign up and I felt like I had no idea how to proceed.

Yesterday I spent 4 more hours, started using packages like autoform, collection2, something for bootstrap, iron-router etc. and I feel FREAKING GREAT. Again my brain clicked and now I implemented ~70% of the features with validation, defensive checks on the server for security, nice-looking popups, good overall UI... I mean, I intended it to be a prototype, maybe mocking some parts but, damn, we basically already have a MVP! In 3 days (effectively ~12 hours)! And now I already know how to implement the rest, it just feels natural now. Like when you have a solid plan and you think it through in your head and you KNOW how to implement each and every step of it.

You can hit a wall with Meteor as much as you can with any other framework (I mostly use Django). It's all about reading the docs, looking at what the community is doing and try to adhere to some "guidelines" (if there's no standard way of doing something). I will let you know how it scales when we reach a couple million users (bazinga!).

Many people would complain about SQL and what not but the truth is there's a very large number of people who are quite happy with MongoDB and the fast experience building an app.

However there are some really big issues that seem to be ignored:

1) It's nice that its backwards compatible but some essential features are missing such as a router. Iron Router is available but it's practically abandoned. You can't even have URL's such as /2 on it.

It makes it hard to keep an app for the long run knowing there is a risk of an essential component about to be abandoned.

Other similar projects include Meteoric (an Ionic wrapper)

2) I wish they'd focus on making Blaze work. It works. Many people don't like react and just want an App build on V1 to work with V1.5 and V2. The lack of clarity is harmful to the use of Meteor in The Enterprise.

3) The build time. It used to be that Meteor built a project near instantly when a file was changed and hot code changed the page. Now it takes a good 20 or so seconds for a simple line change. It seems over the top.

4) Clarity and focus on direction. They spent ages pushing people to their Npm system, now they're going back. Why not start with node_modules/complete npm support instead of flipping back and forth. The volatile state of affairs with Blaze, Npm and the general structure of an app manifests risk in choosing Meteor for an actual Enteprise grade app.

5) A focus on improving what already works well over adding new features and degrading the performance of existing features.

I mentioned the build time, but other parts of Meteor such as Cordova, Blaze, Tracker, Mongo (Meteor uses MongoDb 2.6?!) would certainly help more.

I'm not sure what's happened but it seems a lot like the team is losing focus of what people actually like about the project.

None of the above is limitation of node (or has anything to do with npm package manager).