Echo JS 0.11.0

I don't think some of the analogies hold...  Why wood framed houses are better than sticks and mud, might be a better comparison... or Concrete is better than Mud,  Or if you're only building a doghouse, you don't need concrete and steel.

While software development is not an engineering discipline in practice a lot of the time, it is more apt to compare to construction/building in general.

A lot of the reason for the polarization is that when you are working on a project for a company, you absolutely will favor one over another, and need to be able to defend and back up your decisions to the PHB types.  It is as much political as it is technical in a lot of cases.  IMHO, angular isn't as predictable or straight forward as you might think... There are a lot of times when I'm a user of an application (grubhub comes to mind) and state behaves very weirdly... more often than not, when I'm using apps with weird state issues, it's an angular app.

That's not to say you can't work around those kinds of issues, but it's working around the core of angular.  $scope.$apply(Async) is a huge code smell.  ng2 is better, but still has a lot of similar quirkiness.  Likewise I'm a proponent of React, though I feel too many people reach for either in cases where server rendering + enhancements would be better all around.  More over, I'd rather developers discover and start using sessionStorage/localStorage already to overcome a lot of the weird behaviors.