[btown]

Agreed. You can still get a lot of the code-reuse benefits without lock-in by using tools like Browserify and Socket.io. With Browserify (or any of the other CommonJS packagers), I can use the same lib directory for both my client and server code, and all my utilities/templates/validators/algorithms/NPM modules work on both. One of the most awesome things about Socket.io that's not really emphasized in the docs is that the API for client and server is almost exactly the same, so you can change your mind almost on a whim whether you want a certain RPC to work on the client or the server.

To me, it's a lot easier to "grok" exactly what's going on when you're using a simple middleware layer and a simple socket framework, than when you're using a full-stack solution like Meteor.