[tmeasday]

I don't think it's quite as bad as you make out / think.

As Geoff said, in the upcoming release, it'll be trivial for a meteor package to wrap a npm package and integrate it into the 'walled garden'. If and when a client side package manager appears that everyone is using, I'm sure they'll do the same.

So, I'd expect a situation to arise which is much like that of rails + gems; a ruby library that is not completely tied to rails is usually published as a stand-alone gem, with a X-rails gem which does the railties stuff.

Perhaps it's not as clean as it could be, but I think it's unavoidable when you consider some of meteor's design decisions (synchronous APIs being the biggest one) -- debating these is of course a separate issue.