[pauljohncleary]

Fair point, recent updates to Meteor (1.3) have made it much easier to use with the rest of the JS ecosystem (e.g. using react with meteor is as easy as using the default view library).

The reason you have all of this boilerplate setup with react is because it's only one small part of the equation, so you need to use and (ideally) understand a bunch of other libraries and tools to build something, hence these epic tutorials.