[daffl]

Full disclosure - I am one of the Feathers developers.

I think part of it is a philosophy difference. If you want a one-stop solution you will very likely always end up more locked in and might be happy with Meteor. But, as cool and advanced as the technology is, eventually investors do want a return on their investment and it is really hard to do that without compromising the identity of an open source project. With so much cash in the bank it is also easy to become over-ambitious instead of focussing on doing one thing well. That is tricky in a field that is changing as quickly as web development. The more you add to the project and the more you try to do yourself the harder it will be to react to the ever-changing landscape and you can see that with the challenges of the Meteor package system.

We wanted to explore an approach that doesn't hide complexity by adding more and then putting some generators and configuration files in front of it to be able to say "look it's super easy". The Node ecosystem thrives on tiny modules that do one thing well and Feathers - as a very small extension to Express - does exactly that: Providing a pattern that allows you to create REST and real-time APIs without trying to tell you how to do everything else.