[thejameskyle]

Making it "work out of the box" is something we had before, and we watched as proposals changed and we blew through 5 major releases in like 6 months getting more and more complicated as we went.

On top of that it was only going to get worse as people were throwing proposals around left and right and we never were quite sure what a "sane default" was. We were never sure how to keep people on track with rapidly changing proposals.

The move to a completely configured Babel, meant a move from implicit behavior to explicit behavior. People are forced to tell Babel what they want out of it.

Configuration means explicitness, explicitness means safety.

[andrewstuart]

This strategy underestimates the cost and difficulty of configuration.

Hopefully the message that is coming through here is that configuring Babel is extremely hard and time consuming and error prone and is a massive, massive headache.

I am still right now trying to work out why async and await do not work after spending all day on it.

Probably for Babel experts configuration is easy and quick but for those who are not specialists in it forcing users down a configuration path is deeply, excruciatingly painful.

[pas]

They need a big getting started page and direct newcommers to it where they don't try to be clever, but directly list scenarios.

Or they (or you) could make a configurator (they already have a build-tool focused one, but they need one kind of like what jQuery has) on the website, where you can select your target browser version(s), and what features you want enabled. Bam. Magic! Here's a JSON file, put it into your project root.

Async/await, I'd just go with TypeScript and then transpile the ES6 to ES5 with Babel.

See: https://github.com/andrenarchy/jspm-typescript-es6-boilerpla...