I'm sorry, Ember has come a huge way in 2 years. We've got 2.0, which was a big leap forward, a whole bunch of concepts were refined/removed or changed.
Also you're flat out wrong: Ember-cli isn't really anything to do with the framework. You don't need it to write Ember apps, it's just the communities command line tool for managing Ember projects. That's all.
And if we CAN'T "make decisions today based on the state of things years ago", then we're really screwed.